BPMN and the Business Process Expert

There’s something funny about chatting via IM with someone as you’re listening to them give a public webinar, even when you do know that the presentation is pre-recorded — I was on Skype with Bruce Silver today during his webinar The Business Process Expert and the Future of BPM on ebizQ, where he was speaking with Marco ten Vaanholt of SAP’s BPX community.

Except for one “happy smiling faces” graphic worthy only of Jim Sinur’s blog pimping marketing team, I really enjoyed Bruce’s presentation, although I’ve heard at least parts of it before. He started with a comprehensive description of BPM and why model-driven design is so critical to process agility, which he segued into a description of BPMN and its importance in making process models executable: the heart of model-driven design. He feels that it’s necessary to define the role of Business Process Expert (BPX): someone that bridges between business and IT, creating executable requirements for BPM solutions. Obviously, BPMN is a critical skill for the BPX, and Bruce offers a number of resources including a free series of articles and e-learning modules that he’s done on the SAP BPX community and the longer paid courses that he offers online and public classes through BPM Institute. No wonder he hasn’t blogged for months: he’s been too busy creating all this.

Marco ten Vaanholt talked about the importance of BPM and SOA — fairly motherhood sort of stuff — then dug into some details of the SAP BPX community, which is an incredibly well-developed resource for anyone involved in BPM, whether you’re an SAP customer or not. The core of the BPX community is collaboration and collective learning on business scenarios, process lifecycles, change leadership, social responsibility, horizontal and vertical practices, modeling tools, methodologies and a variety of other topics. It’s not just a discussion forum, however: there’s a lot of really valuable content, such as Bruce’s articles and e-learning, from both SAP and the community in general.

Marilyn Pratt, the BPX community evangelist, has been keeping me up to date on what’s happening on BPX and the worldwide community events in which she’s been involved, and I’m looking forward to catching up with her and seeing more of BPX in action when I attend SAPPHIRE in May.

There was some good Q&A at the end about process modeling and the BPX community. Definitely worth watching the replay, which should be available online at the original webinar link above.