Day 1 of IDS-Scheer's ProcessWorld 2006 is just about done, from the Process of Jazz in the morning to the Process of Party in the evening, it was a fantastic day of keynotes, roundtables, case studies and vendors focusing on the next wave of business process management implementation and innovation. I have to admit I continued my disappointment with lack of Internet connectivity in the conference area and strange stares at the http://AboutEA.com blog URL self-scrawled on my badge, but the great content backing up my convictions of the benefits of an enterprise process orientation for companies of any size and the role of modeling in that way makes up for it.
The founder of IDS-Scheer, Professor August-Wilhelm Scheer opened the conference with a theme I've been pushing in my enterprise, Agility Through Standardization. He and his quartet bandmates swung through 3 parts of his keynote with 3 jazz tunes which illustrated the ability of a team to improvise smartly, effectively, and creatively upon the foundation of a standard rhythm and musical components, or licks, that can be assembled as needed to complete a new melody. A great analogy. He also provided a high-level roadmap or at least assurance to his 3rd party vendor partners that ARIS will not be evolving into a process execution product, but will stick to enabling most of the other aspects of business process management, including modeling, simulation, performance management, and integration with a host of vendor solutions.
Professor Tom Gulledge of George Mason University kicked off the Public Sector
track of the conference with a session on how the Department of Defense is working toward Enterprise Integration. He made an interesting point of how the DoD's move toward Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was kind of predetermined because the application software vendor's they had already chosen long ago to support them were moving in this direction...they really have no choice...good thing. A key take-away for me in this was the challenge that a federated architecture model like the DoD (each DoD agency having their own architecture that was 'contracted' to work in concert with the DoD's overall enterprise architecture) has in standardizing on service definition. If they don't watch out and implement strong governance, then the benefits of an SOA get lost because each entity can define a similar service (like GetEmployee) in many different ways. He also recommended a Burton Group article on SOA and Data In The Enterprise (or something like that) that I will need to check out to understand some of the other concepts that came up.
Prof Tom also moderated a roundtable discussing some of the same issues with folks from US and NATO agencies and their experiences in this area.
After lunch and some great interactions with some of the ARIS product partners (and some cool free-bies), IDS CEO Mathias Kirchmer gave a much anticipated keynote on the Reference Models: Knowledge Assets for Agility. This reinforced my thoughts on the benefits of enterprises to adopt existing models, the more adopted and created by industry the better, and then modify and adapt them to match language of their company and to highlight or raise those areas where the enterprise needs to focus...keeping the models alive as the enterprise evolves and adapts. VCOR and Project Management reference models (the latter based on the PMBOK and built by a company called PMOLink) are definitely ones that I will want to look at further for adoption by our business people. He also introduced me to the concept of Emergent Business Process...processes that change on the fly and utilize variable process steps based on the knowledge attained during process execution, something that could be utilized for knowledge intensive processes like Research and Development processes...something our enterprise could really benefit from. He mentioned work he has done with the Sloan Business School at USC in this area and I will definitely be getting more information on this. Other concept I was introduced to a little more than in the past was the Process Factory, where many reference models are used to come up with a company-specific set of models...or something like that...I need to dive into this topic much more.
Merrill Lynch's Andrew Brown game another great keynote on their work implementing Business Process Management and SOA in the Financial Services area. It was an IT-heavy keynote, but with lots of questions at the end, so you could tell at least part of the audience was very engaged. Folks at this concept really want to take business process modeling to another level and build and implement their processes. Lot of lessons from this session, so I'll have to cover it later when I'm not so tired.
One of the best and most applicable session of the day was a case study of how BPM has been implemented and is continuing to evolve at Bank of America. They have used the ARIS product in many of the same ways we would like to, including adoption of standard classification frameworks (they used almost all of the APQC's PCF!), adapting it to both their organization and to their business process improvement methodology (Six Sigma, yea!), moving responsibility for business models to the business people (what a job), a release cycle for process models in ARIS (design, review, implement, etc.), just to name a few of the key things I got. I need that presentation. (Can you tell I'm getting tired and ready to stop this post?)
Jim Sinur from Gartner linked in the use of Business Rules into the process modeling talk.
And the evening ended with a great dinner, live music, awards, and flashing lights (even on the cups) in the Gen X Retro Lounge.
I'm totally looking forward to a few winks and back at it in the morning. Hopefully it will be a bit more Miami-like in the weather department...I want to wear my shorts one of these days!
Posted by outlawv at February 13, 2006 11:02 PM