Proforma conference presentations

I totally slacked off after leaving the conference on Thursday afternoon, spending the early evening at the Voodoo Lounge catching the sunset from 51 floors, then hanging around the Masquerade mezzanine watching the Mardi Gras show before turning in early enough to make that 7am flight home on Friday. So here it is, Monday morning, and I’m catching up on a week’s worth of blogging.

This was a relatively small conference, about 150 customers attending, but what an enthusiastic group! When one of the speakers talked about how ARIS had been abandoned on a project because of its complexity, there was clapping from the audience, and I don’t think that all of it came from Proforma employees. There were no breakout sessions, just a main stage, and almost half of the presentations were given over to customer presentations. Not only that, all of them were talking about what they’ve actually done with Proforma’s products, not what they plan to do, so had some pretty practical advice for the rest of the crowd.

The product presentations from the Proforma people were also pretty interesting, in part because I haven’t worked with the product that much so a lot of it was new to me.

More detail on the individual presentations to follow.

I also had a number of interesting conversations with customers, and I kept driving to the question of where enterprise architecture fits in their organization. For the most part, companies are keeping it under IT (which I think is a big mistake and posted about previously, not surprisingly when I was reviewing a Proforma webinar), and there seem to be a lot of conflicts in defining the roles of data, information, business and enterprise architects still.

Proforma conference Day 1 quick look

There’s wifi in the conference room, but you have to sign up at the business centre for it ahead of time, which was just too much logistics for me to blog live. However, it’s 5am on Day 2 and my brain is still on Eastern time, so time for a few updates. I’ll do a more complete review of the sessions after it’s all over. First, let’s start with the other conferences that were running in the same conference centre,which you can see in the photo on the left.

Best quote of the conference so far: “I can DODAF FEMA!”, from Tony Devino, an engineer with the Navy, in his presentation about creating a process for quality control on temporary housing installations in New Orleans following Katrina. First time that I’ve heard “DODAF” used as a verb, and a bit funny (well, to EA geeks), especially when you consider that they use DODAF for weapons systems.

Best dance (not usually a category that I assign at conferences): Judson Laipply, a motivational speaker who gave a keynote, also happens to be the originator of the Evolution of Dance, the most-viewed clip ever on YouTube. He talked about change, which is the theme of the conference, then did a live, extended-play version of the Evolution of Dance for us at the end of his talk. I really would have hated to follow him on stage as a speaker!

Dr. Geary Rummler spoke at the afternoon keynote (yes, that Rummler), which was pretty exciting for those of us who have been around in process modelling and management long enough to have a view of his part in its history.

There was a bit of discussion about Proforma’s leading position in the new Forrester report, which is an amazing coup for Proforma when they’re up against a company that’s many times their size.

I’m left with a great impression of Proforma as a company. Although considerably smaller than IDS Scheer, their major competitor, they have an enthusiastic customer base, judging by both the customer presenters and the attendees who I’ve met, and a really nice corporate culture. I sat at the dinner last night with Dave Ritter, one of the founders and currently VP of Enterprise Solutions; we had a lengthy chat before we realized that we had (sort of) met on a Proforma webinar where he spoke several months back, and in some follow-up emails to that webinar. Michelle Bretscher, their PR Director, has given me completely red-carpet treatment, offering to set up meetings with any of the executives, and making sure that I have whatever I need. I don’t think that a lot of press shows up to their user conferences, but when you’re a one-person consultant/analyst/blogger organization, it’s nice to be treated with that level of respect, something that larger vendors could take a lesson from. I also had the most pleasant surprise when I turned to page 6 of the program and saw the watermarked graphic behind the print.

Sessions today include a lot of material from Proforma on their upcoming Series 6, and I’ve very eager to hear about their advances in zero-footprint clients and other Web 2.0-like features, considering my recent focus on Web 2.0 and BPM.

Office 2.0 no, Vision 2006 yes

This past weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving, so I was off for four days at the cottage. Now, I’m blogging in a hurry while I’m waiting for my airport taxi to arrive. However, I’m not headed for San Francisco; in spite of the hoopla about the Office 2.0 conference this week, I’ve decided not to attend in favour of going to Proforma’s Vision 2006 conference in Las Vegas. Ismael belatedly offered me a speaking spot at Office 2.0 on a technical panel, but it didn’t really fit what I felt that I had to offer and I declined. I probably would have attended anyway, just to float in the buzz, and I do like San Francisco a whole lot more than Vegas, but Vision 2006 is much more aligned with what I do and write about.

I haven’t been a big user of ProVision in the past, although I think that it’s a great product. There’s much more importance being placed on process modelling and enterprise architecture in my consulting practice these days, and the conference has a great lineup of BPM speakers.

I’ll be blogging from the conference, assuming that there’s any sort of decent connectivity. The hotel information said that they had dialup internet in the rooms (eeek!), so if that’s all that’s available, I’ll be hunting around for an internet cafe close by.

Although I won’t be at Office 2.0, I have contributed a podcast to the Office 2.0 Podcast Jam about Web 2.0 and BPM — a topic that I spoke about recently at the BPMG conference in London. Subscribe to the Jam’s podcast feed and listen to all the podcasts, there’s some great ones being published all week.