Last week we held our Driven Online virtual conference. It was the first time we hosted our user conference online. The conference ran three days with a mix of speakers from Lombardi, our customers and partners. We worked with eBizQ to leverage the Unisfair virtual conference environment. They both did a great job for us – but more on that in another post.

Here are a couple of interesting thoughts/takeaways that came up during the conference.

The BPM Talent Gap

As companies really try to ramp up their BPM initiatives, they often encounter a “BPM talent gap” in their own organizations as well as in the partners they typically use for solution delivery. Phil Gilbert, Lombardi’s President, talked about how this talent gap is found in multiple roles – from Business Analysis to Program Management to Business Leadership. The good news is that this gap can be readily addressed – often with the team you have at hand. Its just a matter of recognizing the gaps and developing a known set of skills. In fact, Toby Redshaw, CIO at Aviva, talked about the fact that anyone who wants to work in IT over the next few years must be focused on gaining the skills and capabilities required to succeed with BPM. This talent gap issue was also discussed at Gartner’s BPM Show in San Diego this Spring as well as in a great research article called “IT’s Unmet Potential” in the McKinsey Quarterly. Definitely recommended reading.

The Importance of Success Stories

The best way to launch a BPM Center of Excellence (COE) is with success stories. Sometimes the inclination is to focus only on defining standard templates, governance bodies, org structures and the like. In his session, Paul Tazbaz, Enterprise Architect from Wells Fargo talked about how they focused on documenting a set of BPM success stories at the beginning of their COE initiative. These success stories formed the basis of their early conversations with lines of business and corporate IT as they championed BPM across the company. Note that these success stories were about BPM – and many of the success stories predated the formation of the COE. No matter – Paul’s group is focused on getting business units to take advantage of BPM. No better way to do that than to tell them 10 stories about groups in Wells Fargo benefiting from BPM today. Sure makes for a more interesting first meeting with your lines of business than “This is BPMN and you WILL use it.”

Stay tuned for more tales from Lombardi Driven Online. Note that the conference is still available on-demand. If you are a customer or partner and missed the live event, you can still register for access here.

Driven 2008 has come to a close, and we’re really thrilled with this year’s event. Many of the conference attendees stayed for the Lombardi golf tournament yesterday, which took place on the beautiful Fazio Canyons golf course at Barton Creek Resort and Spa. The weather was perfect and the golf was great.

On that note, I thought it might be timely to provide a quick recap of a session that Toby Cappello hosted on Wednesday. The session was called: “The Monday Morning Quarterback Discusses 10 Painful Lessons Learned.” Toby started things off with a golf analogy – one which he lived up to on the course yesterday!

The analogy went something like this: “BPM is like golf – you need to build muscle memory if you want to develop consistency and achieve success.”

In all honesty, I can’t really think of any other combinations of a technology (BPMS) and a discipline (BPM) that fits so perfectly with this analogy. It cuts to the core of Lombardi’s methodology. In fact, if you break it down even further you’ll see more uncanny parallels that help to visualize what exactly you’ll need to do to achieve success with BPM.

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We just wanted to check in and report on the first day of our annual Driven User Conference here in sunny Austin, TX.

The day began with CEO Rod Favaron’s keynote, which was all about how we are now at “the end of the beginning.” The secret is out about BPM, attention and visibility are soaring to new heights, and we are now entering a new phase of adoption and maturity.

A big part of this progression is the move from Project to Program to Culture, as Rod put it — in the early days of course it was all about getting your first BPM project up and running successfully, and then it became all about growing that project into a full-fledged program. But the next phase that Lombardi customers and partners are moving into right now is one in which BPM begins to truly impact the culture of any and every part of the organization that it touches, indeed the organization as a whole. This is the true value proposition of BPM ultimately — the idea that BPM becomes part of your DNA, that process becomes an integral part of what your company does every day.

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Process People will be conducting a series of periodic interview sessions with Lombardi customers to provide useful insight into the BPM issues that they faced at their company, guidance for how to overcome obstacles, and to share the lessons learned during their process improvement journey. These real-world interviews will be posted regularly, so be sure and check back frequently. . .

In this Process People interview, we welcome Jeremy Kraybill, CIO for Boundless Network.

Process People: Describe in as much detail as possible the problem or need on a project level that first made you consider BPM and/or Lombardi as a viable solution.

Jeremy Kraybill: At Boundless Network, we were undergoing a business process re-engineering project at our business. We initially set out to document and analyze manual process changes that would reduce our company’s cash cycle and help us scale our back office. After the first couple weeks of the project, we realized that there were a whole set of business processes held in individuals’ heads that we could benefit from automating. Nobody at the company had previous BPM experience, but after looking at the first BPM vendor’s demo we knew that a BPM solution had great potential for our business pains. After a 3-month evaluation process we selected a BPM solution and have been very happy with the decision and how the implementations went.

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