The Gartner BPM Conference in Las Vegas

I attended the Gartner BPM Conference in Las Vegas this week. It ran from February 4-7 and I was very pleased with how this event is progressing. There were 1000+ attendees, up from September 2007 and comparable in size and scope to San Diego in the Spring of 2007.

This is the world’s largest BPM conference and looks to be progressing as the early planners expected. While the audience is not at the ideal 50-50 balance of business professional and IT professionals, it is steadily headed in that direction. The initial conference had 25% business participation and that number grew to 40% this week.

Gartner is trying to be inclusive by adding other BPM groups and Gurus, and are giving the key participants a platform to reach out and help BPM progress. As I spoke to many of the attendees, both new and returnees, the consensus was that the conference was very helpful for them. This bodes will for the long term health of this conference.

While there was something for everyone at the conference, I will focus on the things that caught my eye. Rather than give you detailed session material, I would prefer to summarize the major themes and give you my take on some of them. If you want some detail, I would look at Sandy Kemsley’s Columns 2 (www.column2.com) as she does a real detailed analysis of selected sessions.

The Softer Side of BPM:

There was a consistent theme around people and organizational change. One of the by-products of doing BPM well is that many people have to change what they are doing. This happens even on the smallest of BPM efforts, so I think Gartner is right in helping the potential change agents (the BPM conference attendees) with guidance on how to complete change in a productive way despite how difficult it is for everyone.

I would like to highlight two sessions that hit the nail on the head for me. Though it was rather basic, Enabling Change and Unleashing Great Performance by Sara Roberts of Roberts Golden Consulting gave a nice overview of the ingredients of change without giving away the methodology. Diane Morello gave a sparkling nuts-and-bolts session on the change process in Rethinking Change: The Practical Realities of Successful Transformation.

Agile BPM

Gartner is also honing in on how important agile processes will be to the wave of the future. Gartner is a little too focused on the SOA approach as the primary way to enable agility, but that comes with the turf of eating heavy doses of material from the power vendors that are working their platforms to be SOA centric (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and SAP).

I think additional insight was given in two presentations that embrace agility in a better manner. Daryl Plummer’s Agility + Process + The power to Respond to Change really framed the complete approach to agility and drove home where BPM and agility mix. Daryl has some very compelling slides describing the types of agility and places to start employing agility. The real highlight for me was Marc Kerreman’s Business Rule Management: State of the Art, where he pointed out the importance of rule management as a key set of capabilities for managing agility in BPM.

BPM Maturity

One of the major challenges we all face in BPM is understanding our respective maturity in BPM and where to focus our efforts and refine the “how to” portion. Janelle Hill hit this hard in her sparkling opening session and Gartner delivered an interesting self assessment tool with a focused follow-up session for those participants who filled out the online survey and wanted some more focused help. The overall results of the survey indicated that we are still in the early stages of maturity.

To that end, Gartner had a number of sessions for those new to BPM. There was Michele WHO? giving the BPM Primer, and Elise Olding presenting Getting Started with BPM. There were many great case studies for folks to attend that helped people see what others had done to gain success. The one disconcerting message here was to not buy tools to help get started. I would propose that utilizing a scoped proof on concept, once a plan and some skill levels are aggregated, is also a good way to start. Process discovery is a great way to go and the tools certainly compiment these efforts.

Emerging Trends in BPM

There were some themes that were highlighted strongly in presentations. There was a session on BPM Methodologies that focused on the depressing fact that this is lagging and no one methodology does a credible job. The SaaS phenomenon was dissected in several sessions. I’m not sure about SaaS yet and I have seen little traction in the BPM space. Also, there was a consistent thread around human interaction management and moving to support the knowledge worker with more flexible processes, decision supports and content.

Bottom Line:

It is clear that BPM is on its way when a BPM for Dummies book is issued, so I think this BPM thing has legs, as does the Gartner BPM conference. I would certainly attend again because of the great content, interaction and professional events staff.

Crossposted from www.global360.com/blog