Kickoff 2010 was hosted by Lombardi February 22nd-26th. Kickoff is an annual, company-wide conference in Austin, Texas that has been a wonderful tradition at Lombardi since 2004. This year, not only did we have all world-wide Lombardians come to downtown Austin, but we also had a large number of IBMers attend. This week-long conference was definitely valuable for the successful integration of Lombardi into the IBM family – we were able to meet, enjoy each other’s company and learn about one another throughout the different meetings and events.
It all started Monday evening at the Austin Music Hall with an interesting presentation by Phil Gilbert at the Opening Reception. This was followed by the 2010 Lombardi Science Fair, an event that has been at Lombardi for 5 years now and is something we hope IBM will continue well into the future.
 Phil's presentation during Science Fair |
 Science Fair Passport and Program |
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Wayne Snell, Senior Director of Marketing | February 22nd, 2010
Next week at the Gartner Business Process Management Summit in London, three Lombardi customers will be on hand to share their BPM success stories. The two-day conference is being held at the Lancaster Hotel from March 1-2, 2010.
Time: Monday, March 1, 14:30 – 15:00 in Westbourne 3
Time: Monday, March 1, 15:25 – 16:05 in Westbourne 1
Time: Tuesday, March 2, 11:50 – 12:30 in Westbourne 1
Additionally, Jim Rudden, our global VP of marketing, will be participating in a Premier Sponsor panel discussion on the main stage. That panel, entitled “Speed Predicting,” is being moderated by Daryl Plummer, Managing VP and Gartner Fellow & Jim Sinur, Research VP, Gartner. The panel format is guaranteed to be unlike any you’ve seen in the past, so you won’t want to miss it.
Time: Monday March 1, 11:30 – 12:00 in Wesbourne 3.
While you are at the conference, come by to meet the Lombardi team as well as our new IBM brethren in the Solution Showcase located in the Nine Kings Suite on the ground floor of the hotel. As an added treat, we will be serving a sampling of Champagne, Chocolate and Strawberries on Monday night.
We hope to see you there!
Earlier today, we announced the completion of the deal that makes Lombardi a part of IBM. Now I’m very excited to share with you the first fruits of the merger: Blueprint now integrates with WebSphere Business Modeler.
WebSphere Business Modeler has some of the most advanced simulation capabilities on the market, so it’s a great option for taking the analysis of your process to the next level. Blueprint’s speed and simplicity combined with WBM’s deep capabilities make a great match.
You’ll find the new option for WebSphere Business Modeler on the Export Data screen. Try it out and let us know what you think!
RecentlyBPM:redux posted an interview with our very own Wes Chung. Wes is one of Lombardi’s Alliances Managers. In the post, Theo Priestley discusses various topics with Wes about Lombardi’s vision for BPM, its evolution to date and more. There are some really great comments worth summarizing here in Process People.
Expectations for 2010 After a Fairly Turbulent 2009
We saw companies strategically select BPM as a means to improve their operating efficiency and also to position themselves competitively for eventual market condition improvements. In 2010, we are expecting that there will be an increased oversight and due diligence on how money actually gets spent.
Training and Education Services
We have expanded our offerings for both on-site and virtual classroom-style skills enhancement. Lombardi University covers all of the roles needed in a BPM program and at all of the skill levels for different responsibilities that exist.
Blueprint
Our customers are using the tool to improve their understanding of their processes and to drive process changes. Blueprint has the ability to:
- Identify differences between operating branches or geographical units
- Standardize best practices and operating procedures
- Manage candidate projects across the portfolio of BPM initiatives
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Crissy McCauley, Blueprint Marketing Program Specialist | December 21st, 2009
Rachel Pace-Maron, Director of Operations Support Service at PRC, was asked to document, standardize and communicate all of her company’s processes to help improve business processes across 15 domestic and 5 international call centers.
Rachel recently sat down with Jim Rudden, VP of Marketing with Lombardi to record a webinar on how Blueprint has helped her company restructure, document and standardize their processes. To listen to the full webinar, click here.
In the webinar, Rachel explains that one of the biggest challenges they faced was that everyone had their own way of doing things. Documents were in piles all over people’s desks and everyone was doing their processes differently. There was no standardization within their processes, which was costing them time and money. PRC needed to be able to take a narrative of their situation and see it in a visual manner.
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This morning we announced IBM’s intention to acquire Lombardi. In case you missed the announcement, you can find it here. I could not be more excited about this. Many of you that have been following us for a long time know that Lombardi has been growing by leaps and bounds over the years. Now, becoming part of the IBM family gives Lombardi the opportunity to reach out to even more companies around the globe and help them solve their process pains and run their businesses more effectively.
Lombardi’s had a long-standing technical partnership with IBM – we were one of the first vendors in the BPM space to deliver a product running on WebSphere. We understand IBM’s strengths and we know how they complement ours as well. We also know that there is a great fit for both Teamworks and Blueprint into the overall IBM BPM portfolio.
We also have many joint customers and partners – so we understand the types of expanded product and service offerings that are needed to drive enterprise level success with BPM.
And, most importantly, we both share a strong passion and commitment to customer success – so our goals are very much in line.
Over the coming weeks we will be sharing more information about this acquisition and what it means for the future. But one thing is clear, the future is truly brighter than ever for Lombardi. In the meantime, I would like to thank our customers, employees, partners, and investors for your support and I look forward to the next decade of BPM.
The December ‘09 update is now live on blueprint.lombardi.com! With this release, we’ve focused on adding improvements that make you even more productive while documenting and analyzing your processes. We’ve refined the new analysis mode we introduced in the last release, greatly enhanced printing, streamlined several administration tasks, and added much more based upon your feedback.
Let’s take a look at the enhancements in detail:
- Refined Process Analysis: We’ve gotten some excellent feedback since we introduced Blueprint’s new analysis mode in October. If you haven’t tried it for yourself yet, in analysis mode Blueprint heat maps your diagram with the information you’ve collected about your process. Areas of waste, high cost or cycle time, and opportunities for improvement instantly stand out. It allows you to have insight and visibility into your process that would have been difficult and time consuming to get previously.
Today we’ve added several improvements based upon your feedback. First, we’ve made both the diagram and the analysis list show much more information presentably. The diagram now shows more detail on the dimension of your process that you’re viewing through a combination of badges on the activities as well as interactive tooltips. Likewise, the analysis list also shows each of the activities in context with the value that’s being heat mapped to them. Want to see the systems your activities leverage while viewing your process as a BPMN diagram? That’s now a very easy task.
One more thing: everything you see in the analysis view is now printable.
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Todd Plunk, Marketing Specialist | November 23rd, 2009
During this past fall, Lombardi has traveled to 5 states and 4 countries attending or hosting industry events. Here’s a brief re-cap of where we’ve been and what we’ve learned along the way…
At the Gartner BPM Summit in Orlando Florida, seven different Lombardi customers presented sessions during the conference. While some sessions were Gartner-sponsored and some were Lombardi-sponsored, it’s always exciting when our customers are able to share their BPM successes.
At the Forrester Business Technology Forum in Chicago Illinois, Erik Keller, CIO of SIRVA, presented a presentation entitled “A CIO’s Perspective On Where BPM Fits.” A very fitting presentation as BPM continues to be a top priority among today’s CIOs.
Finally, I’d like to highlight Gartner ITxpo in Cannes France. On day three, Phil Gilbert, Lombardi’s President, spoke to attendees on the benefit of putting business first in process improvement; including a live technology demonstration on how Lombardi is using next-generation innovation to make that possible. Stay tuned for more details early next year.
So as things start to slow down for the holidays, look for Lombardi next year in a city near you. And as always, you can stay up to date with Lombardi events online.
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Peter Apathy, Systems Transformation Project Manager at the SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium (SEARHC), about their successful implementation of Blueprint. He said “Blueprint is the first place I go when I want to document or analyze a process.” SEARHC is a consortium of 18 remote Alaska Native communities, many of which can only be reached by plane or boat. Blueprint gives SEARHC the ability to unify the workflow processes across these regions.
In February of 2009 SEARHC launched the ALERT Emergency Department Information System, becoming one of the first and largest tribal health organizations in the country to begin implementing this comprehensive electronic medical record (EMR) system. The ALERT EMR is interconnected to ancillary systems (Novarad for diagnostic imaging, Mediware for pharmacy, Orchard for laboratory, etc) using the Health Level Seven (HL7) messaging protocol. HL7 facilitates a standard language between systems, but SEARHC recognized the need for process mapping and documentation in the messaging methodology since every vendor accepted and passed along data such as x-ray orders, lab reports and billing information in slightly different ways.
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The October ‘09 update is now available on blueprint.lombardi.com! This release has some exciting enhancements that I think will make Blueprint an even more valuable tool for discovering and sharing your processes. We’ve added a new process analysis mode, several new properties to the Blueprint documentation template, email notifications for changes happening to your processes, and a many more improvements based upon your feedback.
Let’s take a look the enhancements in detail:
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