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Having finished moderating a BPM in Action webinar on business process platform strategy, I'm listening in on the panel moderated by Beth Gold-Bernstein that includes Bruce Silver, Jeffrey Sterllings (a character from Kiran Garimella's book The Power of Process), Stephanie Wilkinson of IBM, and Steve McDonald of Global 360.

There were some interesting audience questions during the discussion; Beth structured it so that she'd ask an audience poll, then ask related questions of one or more of the panelists, then publish the audience results. I didn't use any audience questions in my panel yesterday, and I found this an interesting technique.

For example, 63% of the listeners use modelling as the starting point for their BPM initiative, 26% state that process automation is their starting point, and 10% use monitoring. I was surprised that there weren't more using monitoring as their starting point, since any organization that has Six Sigma or some other quality management initiative will be monitoring and measuring things before they ever start a BPM initiative. For those that aren't using monitoring, how do you even know that you need BPM if you don't have some sort of measurement of your current processes?

The audience was all over the place in terms of the type of processes that they need to support: although a third of them listed "human and automated" and another quarter listed "human and collaborative". When you added up all the categories, 50% of them have collaborative processes, 58% have automated processes, and 66% have human-facing processes, with a great deal of overlap.

There's still a split between who's driving the BPM initiative, although 56% of the audience said that it's the business side of their organization rather than IT.

I always have to laugh when you get competing vendors on a panel together. In some cases, like my panel yesterday, you get a verbal sparring match (or a brawl, if you have Phil Gilbert on the line). Even when things are more civilized, there's always the competitive streak that makes them have to say things their own way, and not agreeing outright with their competitors. At one point in today's panel, "Jeffrey Sterllings" (Kiran from webMethods) made a statement about BPM and SOA, and Stephanie Wilkinson said emphatically "Well, I absolutely can't disagree with that". Oh, is that the same as agreeing? ;)

By the way, am I the only one who noticed that these sessions were supposed to end at 45 minutes past the hour?

As with all of the other BPM in Action panels and webinars, you'll be able to listen to the replay within a day or two at the same link.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:13 PM in BPM | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us

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