Comparing BPM conferences

The fall conference season has kicked off, and I’ve already had the pleasure of attending 3 BPM conferences: the International BPM conference (academic), Appian’s first user conference (vendor), and the Gartner BPM summit (analyst). It’s rare to have 3 such different conferences crammed into 2 weeks, so I’ll sum up some of the differences that I saw.

The International BPM conference (my coverage) features the presentation of papers by academics and large corporate research labs covering various areas of BPM research. Most of the research represented at the conference is around process modeling in some way — patterns, modularity, tree structures, process mining — but there were a few focused on process simulation and execution issues as well. The topics presented here are the future of BPM, but not necessarily the near future: some of these ideas will likely trickle into mainstream BPM products over the next 5 years. It’s also a very technical conference, and you may want to arm yourself with a computer science or engineering background before you wade into the graph theory, calculus and statistics included in many of these papers. This conference is targeted at academics and researchers, but many of the smaller BPM vendors (the ones who don’t have a big BPM research lab like IBM or SAP) could benefit by sending someone from their architecture or engineering group along to pick up cool ideas for the future. They might also find a few BPM-focused graduate students who will be looking for jobs soon.

Appian’s user conference (my coverage) was an impressive small conference, especially for their first time out. Only a day long, plus another day for in-depth sessions at their own offices (which I did not attend), it included the obligatory big-name analyst keynote followed by a lot of solid content. The only Appian product information that we saw from the stage was a product update and some information on their new partnership with MEGA; the remainder of the sessions was their customers talking about what they’ve done with Appian. They took advantage of the Gartner BPM summit being in their backyard, and scheduled their user conference for earlier the same week so that Appian customers already attending Gartner could easily add on a day to their trip and attend Appian’s conference as well. Well run, good content, and worth the trip for Appian customers and partners.

Gartner’s BPM summit (my coverage), on the other hand, felt bloated by comparison. Maybe I’ve just attended too many of these, especially since they started going to two conferences per year last year, but there’s not a lot of new information in what they’re presenting, and there seems to be a lot of filler: quasi-related topics that they throw in to beef up the agenda. There was a bit of new material on SaaS and BPM, but not much else that caught my interest. Two Gartner BPM summits per year is (at least) one too many; I know that they claim to be doing it in order to cover the east-west geography, but the real impact is that the vendors are having to pony up for two of these expensive events each year, which will kill some of the other BPM events due to lack of sponsorship. Although I still think that the Gartner BPM summit is a good place for newbies to get a grounding in BPM and related technologies, having a more diverse set of BPM events available would help the market overall.

If you’re a customer and have to choose one conference per year, I’d recommend the user conference put on by your BPM vendor — you’ll get enough of the general information similar to Gartner, plus specific information about the product that you’ve purchased and case studies by other customers. If you haven’t made a purchasing decision yet and/or are really new to BPM, then the Gartner BPM summit is probably a better choice, although there are other non-vendor BPM events out there as well. For those of you involved in the technical side of architecting and developing BPM products at vendors or highly sophisticated customers, I recommend attending the International BPM conference.

My continuing Feedburner story

As I mentioned previously, my feed subscribers dropped by 20% when Google switched me from Feedburner to the Google-branded feeds that are replacing them, and a couple of people have told me directly that the feed just stopped working, requiring them to unsubscribe and resubscribe to the new address. I subscribe to my own feed in Google Reader, and haven’t had a problem — it just switched transparently — so I’m suspecting that it’s some combination of specific readers and whatever Google is doing to remap the feed to the new location. Regardless, I’m not happy about it.

Coincidentally, I missed the Toronto Girl Geek Dinner this week, but saw this followup post about a TGGD blog feed created using RSS Mixer. Off I went to check it out, and to see if they had included my blog in the feed, and below the list of feeds that are in the mix, I saw a Feedproxy error message.

I Googled around, and found this thread on the FeedBurner help group that indicates that Google is doing something different with the feedproxy.google.com feeds than was done with the feeds.feedburner.com equivalents, which is the likely culprit for having broken many of my readers’ subscription (depending on their feed reader) as well as the RSS Mixer feed (which would act sort of like a reader).

Gartner BPM: Agile BPM methods

In the spirit of discouraging conference organizers from scheduling sessions that start before 9am, I boycotted the 8:15 keynote session, but showed up for the session on Agile BPM methods. Unfortunately, it appears to be a complete rerun of David Norton’s session from February, so I’m heading out to find a different session.

Gartner BPM: Dynamic BPM

Daryl Plummer’s thing is SOA and dynamic applications, and he presented this afternoon on Dynamic BPM: the ability to support process change by any role, at any time, with very low latency. In other words, (m)any process participant can make changes to the process in order to suit their specific needs, just as Trefler was telling us at lunch. A big part of making this happen is splitting out monolithic systems into more agile components: orchestration engine, portal, rules engine and databases.

Considering the mostly business composition of the audience, he did a pretty deep technical dive into concepts such as dynamic recompilation, showing how the dynamic nature of lower level technical components help to create dynamic processes on the surface.

He went through a well-used diagram showing BPM adoption over the years and where SOA comes into the picture, and the inherent dynamism in models, which is the whole premise behind model-driven design. SOA is used to automate what machines do best, while BPM and the associated process models are used to empower what people do best. More automation actually means more capabilities for the human steps in the process.

He summarized the event capture-analysis-response chain (covered by Roy Schulte in a session this morning that I just couldn’t make myself write about): events triggering business processes, and also monitoring those processes, in order to provide better decision quality, faster response, reduce information overload and reduce cost.

Inevitably, we move on to Web 2.0 and the implications for collaborative, ad hoc and social processes, community evolution of a process, and adding presence and other types of social context to processes.

One of the keys to making processes dynamic is business rules management, since being able to change rules without changing the structure of the process gives us most of the agility that’s required in business while allowing those changes to be made by business users.

Fix my feed!

It’s official: Google screwed up my feed when I switched from the feeds.feedburner.com URL to feedproxy.google.com, even though it was supposed to remap seamlessly. Nice going, guys. I’ve had it confirmed by at least two people that the feed just stopped working, and they had to remove and add it again to their feed reader. I suspect that this doesn’t happen in Google Reader — at least, it didn’t for me, where I monitor my own feed to make sure that it’s working properly — and in fact, this may be specific to certain readers.

If you haven’t seen any updates on my feed for a couple of weeks, remove and add it again using the new URL: this one for posts, and this one for comments. Of course, if you only ever read Column 2 through your feed reader, you’ll never see this post, and just assume that I’ve retired or something. Sigh.

Gartner BPM: Customers say the darnedest things

At the lunch presentation today, Alan Trefler (CEO of Pegasystems) discussed how it’s necessary — and possible — to put BPM right in the hands of the business users, and let them do it themselves. There will be some IT architectural oversight and support, of course, but you just have to convince the users, Tom Sawyer-like, that they really want to paint this fence.

I was sitting beside the BPM architect from one of Pega’s customers, and at the end of the talk I turned to him and asked “Do your business users do this?” His response: “Oh, hell, no!”

We still have a ways to go on this issue…

Appian Forum: Wrap-up

Samir Gulati returned for a brief wrap-up of today’s event before we headed for cocktails and the technology showcase, with Malcolm Ross describing the technical sessions that will be held over at Appian headquarters tomorrow, and Matt Calkins thanking us all for being here.

There are sessions tomorrow targeted primarily at their customers, including one-on-one executive briefings, so I’ll be headed over to the Gartner BPM summit in the morning instead.

I was impressed with Appian’s first user conference, which had great content and was well-run. Kudos to the whole team.

This week in BPM conferences

Last week and this week saw some very difficult choices for conference attending: I went to the International BPM conference in Milan last week, but missed Office 2.0; this week, I’m attending Appian’s user conference and Gartner’s BPM summit in Washington DC, but missing SAP’s TechEd and all my Enterprise Irregulars peeps (although I won’t at all miss going to Las Vegas).

Watch for my coverage of the Appian user conference tomorrow, then Gartner starting on Wednesday.

Feed stats

A few weeks ago, I switched over to the Google version of Feedburner for my RSS feed (since Google owns Feedburner now, they’re transitioning to feedburner.google.com), and my subscriber numbers instantly dropped by about 20%. Either the stats on one or the other are screwed up, or they dropped a bunch of my readers.

Anyone else seeing this phenomenon?

BPM Milan: Managing Process Variability and Compliance

We finished the day with a panel on Managing Process Variability and Compliance in the Enterprise – An Opportunity Not To Be Missed, or a Fools Errand? This was moderated by Heiko Ludwig & Chris Ward of IBM Research, and included Manfred Reichert, University of Ulm, Schahram Dustdar of Vienna University of Technology, Jyoti Bhat of Infosys, and Claudio Bartolini of HP.

Any multinational company ends up with tools and business processes that are specific to each region or country, adopted typically to respond to the local regulatory environment. This presents challenges in establishing enterprise-wide best practices, process standardization and compliance: the issue is to either establish compliance, or accept and manage variability.

The consensus seems to be “it depends”: compliance provides better auditability on high-value processes, whereas variability provides benefits for processes that need to be highly flexible and agile, and you may not be able to apply the same principles across all business processes. It’s only possible to enforce enterprise-wide process compliance when there is a vital business need; it’s not something to be taken on lightly, since it will almost certainly decrease process agility, which will not have the support of regional management. Even with “compliant” processes, there will be variability across regions, particularly those greatly different in size; compliance may then be defined in terms of certain milestones and quality standards being met rather than a step-by-step identical process.

The panel was run in my least favorite form, namely serial individual presentations (which were fairly repetitive), followed by direct questions from the moderator to each of the panelists. Very little interaction between panelists, no fisticuffs, and not enough stimulating conversation.