Our first day at CanundaCon in New York wrapped up with a conversation between Camunda CTO Daniel Meyer and Ernst and Young’s Deepak Tiwari, operated by Amy Johnston. The focus was on implementing best of breed automation in financial services — definitely a topic that I can get behind, as you might have known from my Rolling Your Own Digital Automation Platform presentation at bpmNEXT in 2019 that ended up with me delivering a similar keynote later that same year at CamundaCon 2019 in Berlin. Although there is a technical challenge with selecting the right products to mix into your hyperautomation platform, the bigger issue can be managing multiple vendors, especially when something goes wrong. You also need to create and enforce the best practices for how to use the different products together through a CoE, so that you don’t end up with someone using a process model as a decision tree or other design atrocities.
They covered a variety of topics: how FIs are now considering themselves to be software companies in their own right (which can be okay, or can go horribly horribly wrong); the impact of low code platforms; legacy home-grown platforms versus best of breed based on commercial components; using a process-first approach; IT modernization via cloud replatforming which then triggers application modernization; generative AI (because you can’t have a tech conversation these days without mentioning it at least once); and the interaction of personal devices with financial services. Much of what they discussed was not specific to financial services, and some of the audience questions were specific to Camunda directions.
We finished with a brief fireside chat (sans fire) between Amy and Jakob Freund, touching on CoE, process-first orientation, AI for solution acceleration, and how Camunda has changed and grown as a company.
Having spent the day perched on a hard wooden chair, balancing my folding keyboard and tablet on my lap, I’m ready to go off the record. Back with day 2 coverage tomorrow.