IBM BPM and ODM Analyst Summit

Getting started at the IBM analyst summit for business process management and decision management. David Millen kicked off with a somewhat rambling introduction to the current state of process and decision management in the market and at IBM. Some key points:

• Managing business processes, making them more efficient, remains the top priority for companies when IBM surveys them.
• Managing the change that results from process improvement is identified as a key skill for outperformers in CIO surveys.
• This  ability to make changes is being increasingly consumerized with more and more business people making and managing the changes their business requires.
• Key to supporting this are governance, visibility and collaboration.
• Some new roles are emerging that require more effective management of operations – chief customer officers, chief risk officers, chief commercial officers or chief medical information officers. All roles that cut across silos and are focused on broader kinds of improvement across the organization.
• Adoption of BPM and Decision Management technology is becoming mainstream and proof points that these technologies scale and work well are increasingly common
• Culture, methodology and technology are all crucial – especially culture,though technology and methodology can accelerate it
• He describe BPM as a “system of engagement” that links systems of record across the enterprise
• The technologies involved include IBM Blueworks Live (cloud-based process modeling), IBM Business Process Manager, IBM Operational Decision Manager and IBM Case Manager as the core products and IBM Business Monitor for business activity monitoring. Increasingly these products share a UI look and feel and a range of mobile and cloud solutions.
• Analytics, mobile, cloud and social are trends that affect the enterprise environment and all are having an impact on the BPM and ODM products

Next up was an under-NDA product roadmap presentation.

A customer panel wrapped up the morning with some stories of BPM and ODM adoption. Panels are always hard to blog but here are some thoughts and highlights:

• Use of BPM and ODM has really helped drive business engagement in the process of rolling out new projects
• Customer onboarding, especially in a new area, is clearly a popular process for quick wins
• Compliance drives both process and rules adoption, often together
• Dynamic fulfillment processes are an interesting area where both rules-driven decisioning and process management matter
• Hard-wired imperatives to cut costs v a paper-based process create a context for driving process innovation as well as process design and management
• Metrics are important – knowing what the business wants and needs (and values) is critical to demonstrating success
• The use of Blueworks Live, with its web-based collaboration environment, clearly helped bring a lot more people into the development process and really brought down barriers between business and IT
• Several customers talked about business owners who become business rules/decision management/business process advocates and went looking for problems they could solve with the new approach/technology
• Clearly a focus initially on projects that transitions gradually to a focus on a program driving cultural change
• Ability to self-serve/model with Blueworks live also very effective at speeding projects and getting moving quickly
• Getting experienced resources is a challenge