BPM Summit Day 1 - Part 2

BPM Summit – Day 1 Part 2

I went to the SAP presentation. I must say that I was disappointed – it was more a high level product overview and sales talk. Hm.
It was interesting to see that SAP has transformed itself from a pure ERP player, to a middleware supplier (they stated that they were #3 in the market) and active SOA/BPM standards pursuing company. Question stays if customers actually want that. Nuon for instance stated explicitly: our BPM and SOA layer provider will not be our “content” provider, and vice versa, to limit vendor lock-in. But with an installed based of 38.000 clients and about 12 million users (wow!), some will accept both ERP and BPM/SOA infrastructure from one vendor, I guess…
SAP is of course also busy with their industry templates. Nice to hear that they had a set (in R/3) and decided to simplify them! A lesson that a lot of template providers (to be) will probably still have to learn (and their customers…)

Loose gems from different sessions:
-Oracle: SOA will fail if you do not approach it with a BPM perspective.
- Global360: BPM is a success if you talk to an end-user and they only talk about their application (preferably: their “transformational application”) using only business terms and not mention any tools such as BPM. Aka “Our loan application”, “Our customer portal”.
- Let go of the word “Maintenance”. When approaching applications with BPM, let’s talk about iterations.
- BPM as technology will only deliver process effectiveness, not delivery efficiency. You will need to analyse processes and improve them yourself (using methods such as Lean-Six Sigma, Simulation and Process Automation).
- When starting with a process, a number of starting points exist: bottom-up (what is done/needs to be done), top-down(what goals, what measures).
- You might want to implement processes as-is with a BPM Suite, to be able to start gathering information, and then improve.
- Key question on BPM maturity: are you using BPM technology in AN application (Point Solution), or did you create a BPM Platform to be used by all process aware projects?
- A lot of companies (Oracle) are starting to offer “industry process templates”. Gartner predicts that these templates will become valuable assets. But not all agree.. The key question is: will this add value? Some say: we are not interested in the BPM-S Supplier X Order-To-Invoice process, we want to know how say Procter & Gamble is doing it. The closest companies to get to that kind of information will be process modeling companies and the larger system integrators… And not so much the smaller BPM-S suppliers…

Following later - an interesting presentation about Casemanagement, which in my view is a NEW addition to the BPM field (although some companies have been understanding this already for a while, among others pallas athena, singularity and metastorm).