I’m at my first Gartner BPM show in a while: a couple of years ago, I noticed a lot of repeated information from one summit to the next and decided to sit a few out, but decided that there was enough refresh by now and a good chance to catch up with a lot of people who I only ever see at these conferences.
The show kicked off with Michele Cantera, joined by Elise Olding, giving some opening remarks and introducing the winners of the Gartner BPM Excellence awards: Lincoln Trust, UPS, Carphone Warehouse, NY State Taxation, and Maximus.
The keynote was delivered by Ken McGee, Gartner fellow, opened with the statement that this is the time for the business process professional. He backed this up with a look at the economic growth forecast, including some optimistic survey numbers from businesses stating that their revenues and IT spending are going to increase this year. This was a fairly general presentation on the impact of the economy on business environments and the need to seize new opportunities; not at all specific to BPM, except for one slide of the APQC process framework that didn’t really seem to fit with much else.
Gartner has obviously released a report on the Money-Making CIO recently, and that’s what he spent part of his presentation on: looking at the six styles of money-making CIOS (entrepreneur, cost optimization, revenue searching, innovation, business development, and public serving). He mentioned other Gartner research, such as pattern-based strategy, and told us that social networking and cloud computing are important (duh); this seemed like a a bit of a grab-bag of concepts that could have been given to any IT audience at any conference.
I understand that it’s important to have presentations that show the larger context at a tightly-focused event like this BPM summit, but this didn’t have the cohesiveness or inspiration required to elevate it beyond just a summary of this year’s Gartner research.