After a short (and entertaining) introduction by Gladys Lam, we heard the opening keynote with conference chairs Ron Ross, Kathleen Barret and Roger Burlton. These three come from the three primary areas covered by this conference – business rules, business analysis and business process – and we heard about what attendees can expect to learn about and take away from the conference:
- The challenge of business agility, which can be improved through the use of explicit and external business rules, instead of hard-coding rules into applications and documents. Making rules explicit also allows the knowledge within those rules to be more explicitly viewed and managed.
- The need to think differently and use new solutions to solve today’s problems, and development of a new vocabulary to describe these problems and solutions.
- You need to rewire the house while the lights are on, that is, you can’t stop your business while you take the time to improve it, but need to ensure that current operations are maintained in the interim.
- Business rules need to be managed in a business sense, including traceability, in order to become a key business capability. They also need to be defined declaratively, independent from the business processes in which they might be involved.
- Process and rules are the two key tools that should be in every business analyst’s toolkit: it’s not enough just to analyze the business, but you must be looking at how the identification and management of process and rules can improve the business.
The key message from all three of the chairs is that the cross-pollination between process, rules, analysis and architecture is essential in order to identify, manage and take advantage of the capabilities of your business. There is a lot of synergy between all of these areas, so don’t just stick with your area of expertise, but check out sessions in other tracks as well. We were encouraged to step up to a more business-oriented view of solving business problems, rather than just thinking about software and systems.
I’m adding the sessions that I attend to the Lanyrd site that I created for the conference, and linking my blog posts, presentations, etc. in the “coverage” area for each session. If you’re attending or presenting at a session, add it on Lanyrd so that others can socialize around it.
I’m moderating two panels during the remainder of the conference: today at 4:30pm is a BPM vendor panel on challenges in BPM adoption, then tomorrow at 4:30pm is a panel on business architecture versus IT architecture.