The conference that I was most excited to attend last year was bpmNEXT, conceived and executed by Bruce Silver and Nathaniel Palmer: “it’s like DEMO for BPM” is how Bruce original described it to me, and that’s how it turned out. I blogged almost 7,000 words about bpmNEXT and the individual sessions in two days (on an Android tablet, no less), which gives you an idea of the value that I got from it; you can read what I wrote or watch the recorded sessions from 2013 to see for yourself. Of course, a lot of the interesting bits weren’t in the sessions, but in the face-to-face interactions with the world’s BPM afficiandos, many of whom I hadn’t previously met IRL.
This year’s bpmNEXT is coming up on March 25-27, back at Asilomar – a lovely setting, although a bit of a drive from San Francisco – and you can see the list of scheduled presentations here and register here. You have until February 28 to get the early bird pricing, which includes housing and meals.
To be clear, this is an opportunity for learning, networking and collaborating, not selling to customers. Send your people in charge of strategic product direction and innovation, not your usual conference team. If you’re giving a demo, you have the chance to show off your cool new BPM stuff, whether early-stage demo or released product, and get feedback from your peers. If you’re in the audience, you’ll have your mind expanded and your creativity sparked with the mix of new ideas, and have time to discuss them and make some new business connections.
Disclosure: Bruce and Nathaniel have been kind enough to waive the conference portion of my fee, so that I pay only the housing/meals portion plus my own travel expenses. Note that this is one of the few conferences where I pay my own travel expenses to attend (I would be broke, otherwise), so you can take that as my further endorsement of bpmNEXT.