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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The Spring ‘08 release of Blueprint is now live & kickin’. You might think Blueprint is a cool process modeler, but there’s much more to it. There is no better BPM governance tool on the market.

Governance? What the heck is that?

Isn’t this just another buzzword? And how does something like Blueprint help with governance?

The term “governance” is often used but little understood. And yet if we think about our customers’ successful BPM projects, they always succeed because of tangible leadership from somewhere in the business. A BPM project is not application development, it is a different type of technology-based project. One that is not aligned with the business, but instead one that is integrated into the business. The foundation for business integration isn’t a shared model, it’s a shared understanding.

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