Category: conferences

Gartner Day 0: Bill Rosser

I totally forgot that there were some late afternoon sessions today at the Gartner BPM summit until I showed up at registration around 3:30 expecting it to be deserted, and found a lineup of people trying to get registered before the 4pm session started.

This first session of the conference — missed by most attendees, who haven’t even arrived yet due to extremely inclement weather conditions across half the continent — was entitled “BPM: The Discipline”, presented by Bill Rosser of Gartner.

Rosser’s focus is on strategy, planning and modeling, and he recently shifted to BPM from enterprise architecture and other areas. In fact, last year when I saw him speak at the BPM summit, he was talking about EA, and I wasn’t all that impressed with his presentation then because it failed to make an adequate link between EA and BPM.

Rosser defines “discipline” on a number of levels, from “a field of study, knowledge and expertise” to “a system of rules of conduct or methods of practice” to “a method to ensure adherence to the rules”, then spends most of his presentation on the question of whether BPM is a discipline. First of all, to be blunt, who cares? Secondly, from a purely logical perspective, I don’t think that he proves his argument of whether BPM is or is not a discipline.

Although he had some nice slides on why to pursue BPM — performance improvement, greater agility [sic] to change, and stimulus for innovation — plus some on top-down versus bottom-up implementations, there was really nothing here specific to BPM. I had the sense that this was material recycled from other presentations about other topics, since it was really just a general discussion about discipline and implementing strategy: you could replace the words “business process” with “enterprise architecture”, for example, and hardly have to tweak the presentation at all. In fact, one chart was based on an HBS paper on enterprise architecture strategy, making me think that Rosser had just carried these over from his work in EA. Although some of these ideas here are as valid for BPM as they are for any other business/IT strategy area, I would have expected something that is much more specific to BPM.

Weirdness in the conference circuit

I have a busy next few months lined up, between conferences that I’m attending (such as next week’s Gartner BPM summit in San Diego — check back here then for live blogging) and ones where I’m speaking (such as the Shared Insights collaboration conference in May in Las Vegas). Regardless of my role at a conference, I blog pretty much everything that I see and hear, which the conference organizers like because it gives them a lot of coverage, as well as giving me (and all of you, of course) an historical record of the conference in a searchable format.

I also had an invitation to speak at the American Strategic Management Institute’s BPM summit in Miami next month, but as of today, I’ve been uninvited (although the current version of the brochure on their site still list me as a speaker). The entire interaction with ASMI (or The Performance Institute — the email addresses are from this domain, but I’m not sure of the relationship between the organizations) has been a bit odd. It all started back in November, when I had an unsolicited invitation from Matthew Sheaff of ASMI to speak at the upcoming conference, which was at that time scheduled for March 19-21. His first email to me went like this:

On behalf of The American Strategic Management Institute, I’d like to extend to you an invitation to participate in The 2007 Business Process Management Summit being held March 19-21, 2007. Your remarks would begin at 2:30 on the 19th and last about an hour. The topic of the session that we would be honored for you to present on is “Using Business Intelligence Methods to Forecast Enterprise Process Improvement.”

Weird — what sort of conference has specific session titles preassigned four months in advance, before they even have speakers? Typically, if someone is asking me to speak (unless it’s a last minute fill-in), they specify a track or broad subject area and ask me for an abstract of what I’d like to speak about, and we’d work something out from that which suits their conference and that I’ll enjoy presenting. In most cases, I’m not paid for speaking at conferences, so I like to talk about things that I’m passionate about, and that also happen to fit into the conference theme.

I responded back to Sheaff that I was interested (after all, it’s Miami in March, how bad can it be?) and asked for a few details, and he responded:

As with all speakers, we cover your airfare to and from the event, transportation from the airport to the hotel, your food, conference attendance and one night stay at the hotel.

Okay, pretty standard stuff so far. A few weeks ago, I got an email from the event planner, Caroline Bracher, about speaker logistics. It included the phrase “We allow up to $400 for roundtrip tickets, for your reference if making your arrangements through another venue“, which in conjunction with Sheaff’s earlier assurance that they cover all travel expenses, I interpreted to mean that if I use their travel agent, everything is covered, but if I book my own tickets, they’ll allow me to charge them back up to $400. I have every intention of letting their agent book it, since you really can’t get a flight for $400 from Toronto to Miami this time of year — we are in another country, after all, and a cold one.

Yesterday, I email their travel agent and give him my planned dates of travel. He makes a couple of tentative bookings, and emails me back:

I have made two reservations for and emailed it for you. If you fly on US the fare is 603.95, but if you the AA flights, the fare is 751.90. Please let me know which you prefer cause Performance Institute will cover up to $400.00.

Huh? Must be some misunderstanding, Sheaff’s original email to me clearly stated that my airfare was covered. I emailed back, copying Bracher on the email:

Sorry, I will not be covering any additional airfare — Caroline, that’s not the arrangement that I had with you, you were to cover my airfare and hotel. Please sort this out and get back to me.

Silence descended. No phone calls, no email. Then this morning, the following arrives from Sheaff:

Due to some spacing limitations that we have encountered at the conference hotel in Miami – we’ve had to consolidate our two track event into one. Unfortunately, due to that, we’ve had to cut out some sessions. With that we’ve decided not to run the session on Business Intelligence. I want to thank you for all your help during this process and I hope that we can have the opportunity to work with you in the future. Caroline Bracher, who is cc’d on this email, will be handling all the logistics for the change in the program. I’m sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Things like this just make me shake my head in wonder. The difference between my airfare and their limit was $203.95 (or 351.90, if I went for the non-stop option so as not to have to spend 2 entire days in airports to spend 1 hour speaking at a conference). They’re charging attendees $1,795 for the 2-day conference, which means that about 60% of a single attendee’s fee would pay for all of my travel expenses.

If you’ve already booked for this conference, you may want to request the revised schedule from them: if they really have reduced it to a single track, it may no longer have the sessions that you’re looking for, and you still have a couple of weeks to get a refund. If their last email to me is inaccurate and they’ve just replaced me as a speaker because I wanted them to uphold their part of our speaker’s agreement: well, you can make your own decision on that.

Next Mashup Camp scheduled

Mashup Camp 4 is scheduled for July 18-19, back in Silicon Valley. I’m at the BPM Think Tank in San Francisco the following week, so I’ll just stay out there for the duration and enjoy the weekend between in San Francisco.

Message to David Berlind: we really need to talk about a Mashup Camp in Toronto. We have a huge community here of unconference organizers and attendees, and have had 2 BarCamps, 12 DemoCamps, 3 EnterpriseCamps and a host of other “camps”, including the recent TransitCamp. Just don’t do it in February.

Gartner BPM summit in San Diego

Thanks to a kind invitation from Jim Sinur when we met at the IDS Scheer user conference last week, I’ll be attending the Gartner BPM summit in San Diego on February 26-28. Watch for my live blogging from there under the Gartner BPM category.

If you’d like to meet up while I’m there, drop me an email. Also consider adding yourself to the Upcoming.org event so that others can see that you plan to attend, too.

Second BPMG Toronto chapter meeting on March 2nd

After the successful first BPMG chapter meeting here in Toronto, there’s a second one planned for March 2nd. It would be nice if BPMG actually made some space on their site to advertise chapter events; you wouldn’t find this information if you weren’t on their mailing list (or one of my readers 😉 ).

There is a description of the event in a PDF file on the BPMG site, and I posted it on upcoming.org. It’s free to attend, but you need to register in advance.

ProcessWorld Day 2 wrapup

I fly home in the morning, so I’ll be missing tomorrow’s ARIS User Day; this was by design, since I really didn’t want to sit through detailed product training sessions.

I’ve had a number of people here recognize me from having read my blog, which is very flattering. I had one person tell me that if he weren’t here, reading my blog would be just like being here (um, but you are here, dude…). I was even called the queen of blogging. I’m blushing. The stream of consciousness blogging has been fun, although now I need to go back through all those notes and make sense of some of the ideas.

I sat with a professor from Widener University today who teaches in their Center for Business Process Excellence, a program that I didn’t even know was offered. She was quick to whip out a brochure for me, and although it’s very sponsor-laden (both IDS Scheer and SAP appear on it), it does give an outline of their program and states their mandate:

  • A global initiative designed to forge new levels of business process innovation by strengthening collaboration between the corporate and academic communities
  • Promote research into next-generation business solutions to better prepare tomorrow’s workforce
  • Promote business process modelling by incorporating such issues into the undergraduate and graduate curricula and support faculty and students to engage in research efforts

They offer Masters of Information Systems and MBA’s that incorporate process innovation, plus certificate programs in business process innovation. Some of the courses seem a bit light — a few of them are completed in three Saturdays — and I have no idea what sort of accreditation or recognition that they have for these programs, but any university that is recognizing BPM as an area of study is worth a second look. You can find out more about it on their site here.

ProcessWorld Day 2: General session with Andrew Spanyi

Last up today is Andrew Spanyi discussing the “soft and fuzzy stuff about business process governance” (his words), and I have to say that I don’t envy him the 5pm speaking slot. The audience is sparse — many having departed to catch a flight, go shopping, or just take a break after an already-long day — and those of us that are here are a bit apathetic.

This whole topic, of course, requires a new acronym: BPG (business process governance), which is the set of guidelines focussed on organizing all BPM activities and initiatives of an organization.

Ten minutes into his talk, I’m really starting to feel sorry that I sat on the opposite side of the room from the door, making it impossible to depart politely. Either he’s flipping slides too fast, or my brain has slowed to a crawl, since I absolutely cannot seem to take any notes of value. I did, however, catch his three critical leadership behaviours required for BPG:

  • A high level process model
  • Well-defined performance metrics
  • Broad-based education on process methods

He also pointed out something that he heard from Tom Davenport: major IT systems are difficult to implement, and many projects fail; process change involves new skills, behaviours and attitudes so is also difficult; that makes it difficult to do both at once. And what I’ve seen with BPM initiatives, almost all companies try to do both at once.

Spanyi had a great list of five sure-fire ways to fail:

  • Lack of accountability and authority
  • Insufficient focus on common language
  • Lack of linkage to strategy
  • Insufficient focus on improvement
  • Focusing on method rather than results (e.g., focus on modelling rather than improvement)

At the end of all this, I’m left with the notion that BPG is just another way for consultants to make money. Okay, I’m a consultant too, but not the fuzzy management consulting type: at the end of the day, I actually want to see a system running.

ProcessWorld Day 2: Services industry breakout with Leopoldo Feuntes of AxxiS Consulting

Unfortunately, I had to step away from the conference for a couple of hours for some unrelated business — a group podcast that you’ll see here shortly, and an upcoming webinar — but I was back in time to see Leopoldo Fuentes of AxxiS Consulting discuss a project at the Secreteria de la Funcion Publica de Mexico for implementing best practices within the federal government using ARIS.

One of the first things that they did was to create a knowledge repository for the results defined by their strategic planning process:

  • Organization charts, HR profiles, position descriptions, and knowledge maps
  • Compliance information
  • Activity analysis
  • Operational flows
  • A set of process models derived from all of the above

Once the repository was populated with this information, they could start to leverage it for a number of transformational purposes:

  • To professionalize human resources of the institution
  • To develop the talent of the institution
  • To supply the decision making
  • To transform the ministry into a world-class institution

Not surprisingly, it all came down to process: the process models ultimately allowed them to define the roles and skills of people that they required. However, it had a number of other process improvement type of benefits as well, such as being able to use process models in strategic planning activities, gain some process improvement through better understanding of the processes, and changes to the organization charts to better match the process models. Using custom scripting (rather than the report web publication capabilities of ARIS, which did not allow them the proper degree of change control on the website), they also publish this on their intranet and, selectively, on the public internet, thereby increasing transparency of the organization. You can see the public portions of this here, including the profiles and roles of individual public servants (my Spanish is really bad, so I now can’t find the right link to navigate to those sections, but go ahead and poke around). This type of transparency is becoming a critical factor in most government organizations these days.

ProcessWorld Day 2: Services industry breakout with Marshal Edgison of ELM Resources

The first breakout of day 2, I attended a session on “Optimizing Process Through Business Rules” with Marshal Edgison, Director of Application Development for ELM Resources, a not-for-profit organization focussed on facilitating and processing student loans, about how they’re leveraging both the process modeling and business rules modeling functionality of ARIS in order to drive their modernization efforts. The rules engine integrated into ARIS as the ARIS Business Rules Designer is Corticon.

They selected ARIS because they wanted a modelling tool that was not closely associated with the technology (i.e., from the process execution vendors) and could be used by business analysts. As a loan processing organization, their processes are very rules-based, and they found that their business rules were everywhere — in application code, in database triggers, in user interfaces — and were hard-coded into the system: the classic situation where business rules can be of enormous benefit. They saw an opportunity to not just model their business processes in order to get them under control, but modelling their business rules and encapsulating them into a business rules management system.

They recognized that BRMS could add agility to processes by automating recurring decisions, centralizing rules for easy management and consistent deployment, manage complex logic (they had over 1 million interdependent rules, although they fall into about 5 basic categories), increase development speed and reduce maintenance time and costs. With the ARIS Business Rules Designer, the rules could be seamlessly integrated into processes as automated decision points: ARIS defines the enterprise data model and vocabulary, and the BRMS leverages that vocabulary in transaction processing.

Edgison went through a case study of a new federally-mandated graduate loan program that came into effect in February 2006, with all participants required to support it by July 2006. Many of the financial institutions who are ELM’s member organizations were unable to comply within that timeframe, and it took ELM six months and more than $500K to implement it. As part of the sales cycle for the ARIS Business Rules Designer, they redid this using ARIS and the BRMS: it took one day with four people.

He ended up with some notes on determining whether business rules are right for you:

  • Do you have decision-intensive processes?
  • Do you have operational inefficiencies around decisions?
  • Do you have dynamic, frequently changing rules?
  • Do you need better synergy between business requirements and IT implementation?

Although a bit wordy and totally unable to control one the audience member who asked about 12 questions, Edgison was a great speaker: very knowledgeable about both his projects and the importance of business rules in modelling processes, with the ability to communicate his ideas clearly and in a compelling manner.

ProcessWorld Day 2: Executive Customer Roundtable

The second session of the day was an executive customer roundtable with John Wheeler of Business Processes in Motion (he was formerly with Nova Chemicals, an ARIS customer, but now seems to be offering consulting services that he gently flogged during parts of the discussion), Deb Boykin of Molson Coors, Steve Tieman of Estée Lauder and Todd Lohr of Zurich (whose breakout session I blogged about yesterday), moderated by Jason Mausberg of IDS Scheer.

Conversations ranged around people, executive committment, ERP systems, ARIS as process-enabling tool, data standards and other topics. Most of them seem to be saying that they’re “not yet into the technical layer”, which means that there’s a lot of modelling going on, but there’s still a gap to the executable part — a trend that I’ve been seeing not just over the past few days, but over a much longer period. An audience question at the end of the talk asked that explicitly; the answers were “we’re at the start of it”, “we’re in the early stages”, “not that far along at all” and “it depends on how you define SOA” (which was a bit of a nonsense answer that included BPM as part of SOA so stated that if you had implemented BPM, then you had done some SOA — another way of saying the same thing as the others, I think).

Random thoughts from the various speakers:

  • using ARIS to link strategic to tactical goals, identify metrics and get a handle on costs (this was from Molson)
  • business architect plays a key role in achieving agility; a dissenting opinion said that their management didn’t see the benefit of agility (which I found amazing)
  • adherence to standards, both by customers and the software vendors who serve them, is critical
  • BPM isn’t a fad, it’s part of a long-term push to process innovation
  • use BPM to determine if people are behaving the way that we think that they’re behaving

There was an audience question about how the panel members got their senior management to embrace BPM. The consensus was to start at a tactical level, get some wins on smaller projects, then use those successes to engage the executives by showing them some real benefits. No surprises here: this is not a fundamentally different story from introducing any new concepts or technology within a company.