Jim Sinur

I had the pleasure to speak at the BPM Think Tank in Chicago earlier this week and I spoke on the Economics of BPM. Based on what’s happening on the economic front these days, I managed to pick a good topic. You will have to ask others how I fared, but from reading Column 2 by Sandy Kemsley Column 2, I was fine for the first time out with this material. Others like Scott Francis BP3 & Paul Vincent Complex Events looked at the presentation from other perspectives. I figured it was low risk to try some new material on this crowd. Based on the turnout, I lucked out again.

I was rather disappointed in the mix of the crowd (the numbers weren’t great either at about 50). I was promised mostly a business crowd, but there were more process monks than business types. I’m not sure if OMG, even boosted by BP Trends, would attract business types of any kind. We have been seeing upward of 45% business types at our BPM conferences, so I am encouraged about the Gartner direction to reach beyond just the IT types.

I did enjoy the format and topics however. Over two days there one could participate in four round table discussions that would report back to the general assembly. This worked out well to focus the groups on netting out results and communicating them concisely.

.I was particularly interested in the following topics, but there were many more to enjoy:

BPM Enables Innovation

BPM speeds deployment

BPM is good at incremental improvement

BPM can automate the innovation process

BPM is good at cost containment so it lives to innovate along the way

Achieving Collaboration between Business and IT in BPM

BPM helps educate both parties the end to end process

BPM helps educate all in the weaknesses of function excellence

BPM helps get stake holder buy in despite organizational hindrances

BPM can iterate towards long term goals with intermediate benefits

Why BPM isn’t successful?

BPM is experiencing the sophomore effect (great start, but now what)

BPM technology purchases are purchased early and sit for a while

Anyone in the collaboration can kill and process idea

Bottom up approach sometimes causes problems

On the balance, I thought the topics were great, the format worked well, but the wrong crowd was there. Some feel that OMG should stick to its standards roots for which this crowd was well suited.