I've been negligent in my blogging lately, in part because the weather in Toronto has been absolutely beautiful -- our summers are short enough that you really have to get out there and enjoy it while you can -- and in part because two important people in my life have been moving house (one of them in with me) so I've been spending much of the last two weeks packing and moving boxes. However, the sumac bushes are starting to change colour, indicating that fall is on the way and it's time to get back to some serious work.

One project that I'm working on is my presentation on BPM and Web 2.0 for the upcoming BPMG conference in London on September 18-20th, which gives me a chance to spend a few days in one of my favourite cities. I attended the conference last year and it had a lot of great content; the agenda for this year looks to be shaping up well and I'm looking forward to sitting in on some of the sessions. If you're at the conference, please drop by to say hi.

If you're going to be in the US instead of the UK during that time, you can attend BrainStorm's BPM conference in Washington DC on September 19-20th. In fact, if you're interested in joining ABPMP, there's a special deal available where you'll get your ABPMP membership for free (a $100 value) if you register here by September 1st and specify the priority code ABPMPDCNON when registering.

We're still planning to launch the ABPMP Toronto chapter with an event sometime this fall; if you're interested in this chapter, please join our Yahoo group which acts as a mailing list.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 04:22 PM in ABPMP • BPM • BPMGProcess2006 • Web2.0 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (1) | Add to del.icio.us

ABPMP San Francisco chapter meeting
Originally uploaded by skemsley.

Last night I attended the inaugural meeting of the San Francisco chapter of ABPMP, which included a presentation by Paul Harmon of BPTrends (pictured).

Paul had some interesting comments about a past attempt to start an ABPMP: a couple of years ago, he and a few others tried to get one started in San Francisco, and only vendors showed up. The challenge for this new attempt, as well as our starting chapter in Toronto, will be to create a critical mass of enough end-customer practitioner involvement to make it relevant.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 01:02 PM in ABPMP | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I'm in a webinar (sponsored by Proforma) with BPTrends' Paul Harmon discussing their recent survey of business process trends. I expect to meet Paul face-to-face next week at the ABPMP chapter meeting in San Francisco, where he'll be speaking on "Business Process Today and Tomorrow".

The first part of the webinar is pretty much just a review of the report itself, with a minor degree of added value, although it's good for those who find it hard to plough through a 54-page report and find the high points without nodding off. He highlighted that most people are still doing their process modelling in Visio or PowerPoint (see page 29 of the report), although sees that as an indicator that an organization isn't yet fully serious about their process modelling efforts because of the lack of an enterprise view that you can get with a repository-based tool such as Proforma's. He sees many of the survey results as indicators that the BPM market that is still developing, not yet mature, and calls the market for tools "confusing" as he discusses the diagram on page 45. Considering that analysts tend to redefine "BPM" every couple of years, causing a vendor feature catch-up scramble, neither of these points is surprising and I agree with him. Furthermore, I think that the large percentage of Visio modelling is also an indicator of an immature market as much as it is of immature BPM initiatives within an organization.

He went through some results that I don't recall seeing in the report that summarized what people would be doing less, the same, or more of in 2006 (the survey was taken in February), grouped into enterprise, process level and implementation activities as per their pyramid (page 41-42 in the report). He sees most of these trends as further proof that we're still in a developing market for BPM, such as the large number of companies that are planning more of BPM systems, major process redesign and automation projects, and process analysis and design training in 2006 than they've done previously, as well as developing an enterprise architecture and enterprise performance management. I like the fact that he doesn't show any bogus hockey stick projections for BPM growth; those of us in the BPM business have been seeing those for many years now and are understandably wary.

The webinar will be available for replay at some point; check the original registration link or the Proforma website to find it in a few days.

Slightly off topic, I appreciate the collaborative spirit of many recent webinars that I've attended of opening up the dial-in line so that any of the attendees can speak up with their questions (rather than using a chat window), but it doesn't work so well in practice due to the large number of people who can't find the mute button on their phone or just don't consider the listening experience of others on the call. I can hear background conversations, papers rustling, computer noises of all sorts, and even a dog barking, all in spite of the speaker's repeated request for people to mute their phones. Even on an online demo that I attended the other day with only two other attendees besides myself, one of those two put his phone on hold during half of the demo which treated the rest of us to the periodic "beep-beep" that most phone systems emit to the party on hold (and gave the speaker a pretty good indication of just how unimportant the material was to that attendee, since we could easily identify who had hit the hold button).

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 03:08 PM in ABPMP • BPM • EnterpriseArchitecture | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about our startup meeting of the Toronto chapter of the ABPMP. I checked around for the other North American chapters and have now found myself invited to the inaugural meeting of the San Francisco chapter next Thursday evening. Paul Harmon of BPTrends will be speaking, which should be interesting; I always enjoy his online writing.

Before you surmise that I'm a complete travel junkie (which I am), I had already planned to be in San Jose next weekend for BlogHer and fly in mid-week to spend a couple of extra days in San Francisco (one of my favourite cities), making the timing perfect for the ABPMP meeting. Time and place as provided to me by the chapter organizer are here on Upcoming.org; note that the address on the ABPMP website is incorrect.

If you're in the Bay area and are interested in business process improvement or business process management, you should consider dropping in for the meeting -- it's free and open to all. You can also check out the chapter's Yahoo Group, although it doesn't appear to be very active yet.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 10:38 PM in ABPMP | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us

I'm heading off to the first meeting of the newly-forming Association of Business Process Management Professionals Toronto chapter. I had posted a comment about ABPMP somewhere, and heard back from the organizers about starting a Toronto chapter, leading to today's meeting of like-minded people here in Toronto.

If you're interested in getting involved, check the ABPMP Toronto chapter page or join our Yahoo discussion group. If you're an ABPMP member in another region, I'd love to hear about what your chapter does.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley at 09:59 AM in ABPMP | Permalink | TrackBacks (0) | Add to del.icio.us