Upcoming BPM conferences

I’ve been negligent in my blogging lately, in part because the weather in Toronto has been absolutely beautiful — our summers are short enough that you really have to get out there and enjoy it while you can — and in part because two important people in my life have been moving house (one of them in with me) so I’ve been spending much of the last two weeks packing and moving boxes. However, the sumac bushes are starting to change colour, indicating that fall is on the way and it’s time to get back to some serious work.

One project that I’m working on is my presentation on BPM and Web 2.0 for the upcoming BPMG conference in London on September 18-20th, which gives me a chance to spend a few days in one of my favourite cities. I attended the conference last year and it had a lot of great content; the agenda for this year looks to be shaping up well and I’m looking forward to sitting in on some of the sessions. If you’re at the conference, please drop by to say hi.

If you’re going to be in the US instead of the UK during that time, you can attend BrainStorm’s BPM conference in Washington DC on September 19-20th. In fact, if you’re interested in joining ABPMP, there’s a special deal available where you’ll get your ABPMP membership for free (a $100 value) if you register here by September 1st and specify the priority code ABPMPDCNON when registering.

We’re still planning to launch the ABPMP Toronto chapter with an event sometime this fall; if you’re interested in this chapter, please join our Yahoo group which acts as a mailing list.

Process 2006: BPMG’s annual conference

A follow-on to last May’s conference, BPM 2005, is Process 2006. I’ll be headed to London for the conference next month, but this year I’ll be speaking on the impact of Web 2.0 and social networking on BPM: mashups, tagging and more. From the abstract that I sent to Steve Towers, the conference organizer:

As Web 2.0 advances on the world, expectations for how software will behave are changing, and BPM is no exception. Although many of us from the technology side are working in the echo chamber of Web 2.0 hype, real applications are being deployed that are changing what people will accept with respect to software capabilities and usability. Flickr. Google Maps. Blogger. Del.icio.us. Newsgator. Gmail. Mashups. What do these have in common? More importantly, what can enterprise applications such as BPM learn from them, and what will they be forced to learn from them?

Specifically, I want to talk about some of the characteristics of Web 2.0 and how they will directly impact BPM within organizations: tagging, and the idea of a user-generated folksonomy for categorizing information; user-created content, including their own processes; collaboration; rich user interfaces for web-based applications; RSS feeds and similar subscription models; and lightweight integration models such as we’re starting to see with web mashups.

The conference agenda doesn’t have my session’s title (Steve suggested “Web 2.0 = BPMS 2.0 ?”) or description, but that will all get sorted eventually.

Should be fun, except for the fact that I may be unable to carry my laptop with me (and I’m unwilling to put it in checked baggage). I’m not afraid to fly, but I’m terrified of spending 7 hours on a flight with no laptop or iPod!