Friday, March 2, 2007

Gartner BPM Summit - Inside-Out

I just came back from the Gartner BPM Summit a couple of days ago, and I found it quite stimulating and validating. The sessions were fairly diverse and the content was palatable for both business and I.T. professionals. The keynotes were fantastic and I particularly enjoyed Peter Schwartz's talk on Scenario Building and thinking about the future. I'll probably pick-up one of his booksin the near future. On the last day of the conference, Gartner set aside 1.5 hours for "how-to" sessions. There were some tough choices to be made, because they crammed 4 very compelling sessions into the same time slot. I chose to go to Steve Towers and Terry Schurter's session on aligning processes with customer expectations. Bruce Silver's session on BPMN came in a close second. Too bad Gartner couldn't give one more slot for How-To sessions, because I really wanted to sit in on his session too! Steve and Terry's session was a boiled down version of their full BPMG training. As in the BPMG training, they focused on how BPM should be done in the context of meeting customers' expectations. That's one concept that was lacking from much of the conference--the importance of the customer in dictating how we structure our processes. I'm wondering if anyone else could help me answer the following: Why was the focus of the Summit mostly on making processes more efficient (inside-out) versus actually innovating processes to deliver on customer expectations (outside-in)? The biggest bang actually comes from innovating processes to meet customers' expectations. Both approaches have there place, but the Summit really missed the boat on the Customer-centric approach. I'm sold on the fact that this "outside-in" approach is the way to implement BPM, but aside from Steve and Terry and only several powerpoint slides throughout the rest of the conference, the outside-in approach was absent.