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Highlights of BPM Community Summit 2015 – Part 2

“Don’t Use a Sledgehammer to Put in a Finishing Nail!”

On March 26, 2015, Princeton Blue hosted its first ever BPM Community Summit in New York City’s financial district, in response to overwhelming demand from last year’s participants. The BPM Summit provides a unique vendor agnostic format where customers pick the topics and lead the discussion. Our customers relish the opportunity to network with their peers, and hear each other’s stories first hand. The Summit engenders a sense of community and open dialog that our participants find invaluable.

The proof: a consistent 9+/10 rating from the participants! Customer-selected topics included:

  • Using Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) to manage business rules across lines of business
  • How different tools/platforms can and should work together (EA, BPA, BPMS, ECM)
  • What is BPM Strategy?
  • Practicing Enterprise BPM

In our last blog entry, we shared highlights from the first topic. Today, we will highlight the community’s thoughts on “How different tools/platforms can and should work together (EA, BPA, BPMS, ECM)”.

This topic explored the progression of tools in a company’s portfolio.

The participants agreed that it’s best to consider a company’s maturity, size, and needs in making tool selection. After all Post-it Notes and Whiteboards can deliver value for some companies, especially small ones. Visio can also work, up to a point, but it’s limited by the lack of metadata. While larger companies need more tools than small ones, there’s neither sense in rushing into more tools (quantity) than you need (“it’s a journey – inch by inch is a cinch”) nor is there a need to get more tool (quality) than you need (“don’t use a sledgehammer to put in a finishing nail”).

The discovery process is key. Often times, you won’t be able to articulate what you need at the outset. You can learn a lot by just getting started with a tool. Business metrics are important. The tools you use must support gathering the metrics you need. For example, many of the participants track the business case for automating a process, and compare expected vs actual benefits. This information can also be used by an analytics team to identify opportunities for future gains.

Participants split in the progression of tool acquisition, with some arguing for ECM -> SOA -> BPMS, and others favoring SOA -> ECM -> and BPMS. All agreed that BPM is a discipline and not a technology (and certainly not a technology for speeding application development!)

Finally, no vendor seems to do a perfect job of integrating everything.

Join us next time for Part 3, the final installment, when we will share the community’s thoughts on the last two topics. Discover who the community thinks is the best at thinking in “boxes and diamonds”. Follow Princeton Blue on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter & Google+ to get focused BPM-specific updates.

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