Gartner BPM Summit Day 1

This year’s -- or should I say, this half-year’s -- Gartner BPM summit is squarely focussed on strategy and organizational change. I say half-year because Gartner announced this morning that they would be holding another BPM summit in September in Orlando, Florida, which seems to me to be a bit of an oversaturation of the market. Certainly they’ll get almost no overlap in attendees between here and Orlando, and the vendors might get a bit weary of this twice a year, plus once in the UK and once in Asia.

The BPM summit kicked off with a keynote by Simon Hayward, one of my favourite Gartner speakers. He had a couple of major themes: what is it about this point in time that is making BPM so important and relevant, and what are the advantages of being a process-centric organization? The interest in not just the Gartner BPM summit but everything to do with BPM, SOA and integration technologies in general certainly indicates a strong interest in BPM right now, and I think that this is becoming relevant because we’re reaching some sort of tipping point with respect to complexity of applications: we need BPM and related technologies in order to easily assemble new applications rather than resorting to the coding practices of old. As for why it’s important to be process centric, Hayward highlighted the two key benefits: agility and visibility. To simplify, almost everything to do with business improvement these days is related to agility and visibility, and process/BPM is right in the thick of that. He also touched on another major theme of this conference, that of having the right process-oriented people on BPM project teams and that same process focus rippling up through management layers.

Janelle Hill echoed some of these same sentiments in her presentation later in the morning: the need for agility due to globalization pressures, and how information transparency accelerates the commoditization of products and services. Again, we’re back to agility and visibility as the key issues around process improvement. She took a closer look at some of the technologies, and made some key recommendations around the process training and skills required by BPM project members: you’re not going to be successful at your BPM projects if you just recycle the same old architects and analysts; you need to have people who have a process orientation and can leverage the impacts that BPM technologies could have on the organization.

Jim Sinur took a very different tack by discussing business rules and BPM: how rules affect processes, and when the ability to change rules for in-flight processes can have a strong positive impact on process agility. Most organizations understand the benefits of externalizing rules from enterprise software into busines rules management systems; this takes it a step further by looking at both benefits and risks to allowing business rules to be changed frequently. The key is to understanding both sides of this equation in order to select the rules that should be readily changeable, potentially directly by the business community.

At the end of the day, it still all comes down to agility and visibility. BPM (and business rules) can bring both of these to an organization if properly implemented, and if the right process-focussed people are put in place to support the BPM initiatives.

You can read all of my (much less structured) "live blogging" posts from the Gartner BPM summit over on my ebizQ blog.