bpmNEXT 2015 – Call for Submissions

bpmNEXT presentations are always about “showing not telling.”  The presentation format is strictly enforced:

Click here for the submission form.

As always, the demand for speaking slots exceeds the number we have available.  This year we are going to announce the program agenda in early December, so if you are interested in securing a slot, you need to act fast.  Our submission deadline is November 21.

Submission Deadlines

Submission Details

In the submission form you must specify the title of the presentation and tell us what problem you solve, how your approach is better than what is available today, and when and in what form it will be available to customers. You must also agree that except for a 5-minute introduction in the Ignite format, your presentation will be entirely a live demo (running software, no slides).

?Provisional acceptance? of your submission means that your are accepted into the program, conditional on a satisfactory ?preview demo? of your proposed session, as well as your Ignite presentation, at a date to be scheduled after December 3, 2014.

Upon provisional acceptance you will be considered part of the program and will be asked to provide a final bio, session abstract, headshot photo, and company logo.  At this time we will also provide an event preparation checklist, including general information on format and expectation, and schedule your online preview demo.

While our final submission deadline is November 21, 2014, it is advantageous to submit by October 31, at which time we will conduct our first round of submission evaluations for purposes of categorization and ranking.

Also, just to reiterate, final acceptance is conditional on your presentation of the demo (and Ignite intro) to our program committee by  February 28, 2015.

bpmNEXT 2013 Review

Thanks as always to Sandy Kemsley for a detailed summary of all the talks.  My review is more impressionistic.  The goals of the program were these:

And the program in the end met those goals.  It was really really good.

There were several themes in the presentations:  lowering the barriers to business users; leveraging social networks and mobile devices; handling unstructured work; expanding the boundaries of process analysis.

Lowering the barriers.  Signavio showed a variety of ways to create process models without drawing them, including simple tabular input, voice input, and a Tai Chi like gesture recognition.  itp commerce showed automatic scoring of BPMN models for quality across several dimensions.  camunda showed true roundtripping between third-party business-oriented modeling tools and a BPMS, the first I?ve seen to do that well.  Trisotech showed simple but a radically different style of tooling for capturing SME input for both BPM and ACM (is there really a difference?)  Knowledge Partners International showed how business users can directly model and maintain thousands of business rules using The Decision Model.

Social and mobile.  BonitaSoft and WebRatio both showed integration of BPM with popular social networks, and TidalWave showed BPM applications within the Facebook environment.  OpenText previewed Touch, their next-generation social/mobile platform exposed as an embeddable widget throughout their BPM/ACM portfolio.  BP3 gave a great presentation on what adding mobility to BPM really means and the best ways to do it, native vs hybrid vs responsive HTML5.  In a similar vein, Kofax showed how a cloud multi-tenant BPM architecture should really work.

Unstructured work.  IBM surprised me with a demonstration of how adding stateful data to the process modeling environment opens up the whole world of unstructured work to the BPM platform.  Now tell me again why BPM and case management are different products?  Bosch showed how events from sensor-enabled ?edge devices? can be processed by rules to create self-maintaining machinery.  Whitestein gave a mind-expanding demo of goal-directed BPM layered on top of regular BPMN process fragments ? for me this was Best in Show.  Computas showed their implementation of ?malleable tasks? ? an award-winning solution in production ? where events trigger a set of case tasks each of which can be customized at runtime by the end user.   EnterpriseWeb (fka Ideate) showed an environment in which all aspects of the process are networks that can be freely interconnected by end users to manage work.  It was really ?out there?.  And Keith Swenson gave a sneak peek at Cognoscenti, a Fujitsu skunkworks project that creates ?antifragile? processes by empowering end users to freely add and interconnect projects are runtime.

Expanding the boundaries of analysis.  Fluxicon showed a very polished demo of process mining, automated model discovery and analysis from event logs that ultimately won the Best in Show voting.  PeopleServ showed a tool for managing the complex relationships between people in the organization, which could and should be leveraged by BPM.  Lloyd Dugan and Mohamed Keshk showed how ontology tools make vast archives of process models searchable.  Process Analytica showed a tool for automatically optimizing staffing allocation based on parameterized simulation.  Oracle gave a terrific preview of the next-gen BAM Composer, business-oriented tooling that can generate interesting dashboards of operational data, such as trending KPI values.  SAP gave an equally impressive demo of Operational Process Intelligence, able to monitor end-to-end performance spanning BPM and non-BPM systems.

I would say I learned something new from every presentation.  Attendees voted for Best in Show using an app created by WebRatio.  The winner was Fluxicon, followed by Whitestein, then Fujitsu.  We?ll be posting the videos of all the talks to the bpmnext.com website in a few weeks, and possibly open a second round of voting or liking to the public.  So stay tuned for that.

Announcing bpmNEXT 2013 Program

It took a bit longer than we hoped, but the program at bpmNEXT 2013 is now set.  bpmNEXT, which takes place March 19-21 at Asilomar Conference Center on the Monterey Peninsula, is not your typical BPM conference.  It’s a technology showcase spotlighting the next generation of BPM software innovation.  No how-tos, best practices, or case studies, just a fast-paced series of demonstrations of new capabilities that are transforming the BPM (and surrounding) landscape.  We’ve heard a lot of talk about social BPM, but how do you build apps that leverage Facebook, Salesforce Chatter, or Google Talk?  You’ll see that.  What should BPM on mobile devices really look like?  You’ll see that, too.  Tools that lower the barriers to process modeling and automatically assess the quality of the output.  Real roundtripping between a variety of BPMN tools and a BPMS.  Automated staffing analysis that optimizes the tradeoff between labor cost and wait time.  Business-oriented tools that sense KPI trends to give advance warning before trouble occurs, and operational process intelligence that monitors end-to-end processes across heterogeneous infrastructure.  And let’s not forget adaptive case management, unstructured but goal-directed processes.  We’ve all heard the talk, but at bpmNEXT you’ll see it in action.

The program starts on the afternoon of March 19 with a keynote by Paul Harmon, Executive Editor of BPTrends, who will set the stage with a talk about how technology innovation will impact the practice of BPM.  Then we get down to some serious eating and drinking.  The presentation program begins bright and early on March 20 and continues through the afternoon of March 21.  One track, 24 presentations – 20 minutes of demo with 10 minutes Q&A – by the people leading the charge in next-gen BPM.  The audience will be knowledgeable and the debate will be lively.  At the breaks and receptions there will be plenty of time for deep dives with the presenters.  And at the end, attendees will use a social BPM app to select the Best in Show.  Here is a summary of the program:

But bpmNEXT is more than the program.  The social interaction is what will make this an unforgettable event.  The movers, shakers, and thought leaders of the BPM world will be there, and I expect the Q&A to be intense.  Asilomar’s accommodations are rustic and the scenery is spectacular, creating a retreat-like atmosphere.  On the beach, at the tip of the Monterey Peninsula, right next to the Pebble Beach golf courses and 17 Mile Drive.   Think of this as the Bohemian Grove of BPM.  You won’t want to miss it!

The room only holds 200, so don’t be left out.  Early bird registration, until February 19, is $1495, all-inclusive (2 nights hotel, meals, and event admission).  After that it goes up to $1995.  More information about the event is here, or just click here to register.

 

 

Signavio – Speech-Driven BPMN Modeling

We just returned from the “Signavio Code Camp” where we worked on exciting new technology for process modeling.  In order to make modeling even simpler we integrated speech recognition technology for modeling:  You can just “tell” the process description to your mobile device. The Signavio platform will then turn it into a BPMN diagram.
–Gero Decker

Information for Submitters

bpmNEXT is about seeing BPM technology in action, doing something worth doing, and doing it live on stage.  It doesn’t have to be shrink-wrapped and ready to ship, but it needs to demo well.  We only have around 20 presentation slots, so selection is competitive.  Submission is a two-step process.

Submission Process – Step 1

The first step is a text description of the submission, using the form provided on this site.  In addition to basic contact information, Step 1 is essentially the elevator pitch, similar to what you might see at a startup-oriented event for VCs: 1) What problem are you trying to solve, and why is this important?  2) What will users be able to do with the help of your offering?  3) What is especially innovative or otherwise noteworthy about your implementation or approach to the problem?  4) How and in what form do you expect to make the offering available?

Step 1 submissions are open now.  An individual or organization may make any number of submissions.  Just make sure you provide a separate form for each submission.

Submission Process – Step 2

Around October, 2012, we will select a list of finalists from the list of Step 1 submissions.  Finalists will be invited to submit a narrated screencam video, 5-10 minutes in length, essentially an early version of the final presentation at the event.  The first couple minutes should provide the elevator pitch as in Step 1.  The rest of it should demonstrate the technology or offering in action.  If some aspect of the functionality is not real but simulated in the video, you must indicate that clearly in the submission.

Submitters will use their own resources to host the video on one of the oEmbed-compatible websites listed below.  oEmbed is a format that works well with the WordPress platform used by the bpmNEXT website.

The deadline for submissions is tentatively scheduled for November 30. This is almost 5 months in advance of bpmNEXT, so we understand that the submission may not be as complete as the real thing.  But the submission cannot just be a proposal for future development.  It has to be working in some form or fashion.

Guidelines for Submitters

We expect more submissions than we will have time for at the event, so making a compelling submission is important.  Two elements in each submission are critical.  First is the elevator pitch: why is this important?  what problem does it solve in a new or better way?  who needs it, and why?  That should be the first 20% or so.  The rest of it should show the demo in action.  You probably will not have enough time to explain how you did it, or the technical architecture.  If it includes a design tool, you won’t have time to show how everything is configured to do the magic that comes next.  The key thing is a demo that makes us believe that it works, and really does represent something new and different, useful and  cool, and important to the next generation of BPM.

Announcing bpmNEXT

Today we’re seeing more innovation in the technology of BPM than at any time in the past several years.  Big Data, real-time  sense and respond, predictive analytics, goal-driven and “adaptive” processes, social BPM, mobility….  The list goes on.  Wait, you say, that’s not really BPM.  But what you mean is they are missing from the current generation of BPM Suites.  That’s true, but not for long.  If these new elements in the technology landscape do what they promise, they had better be incorporated into the next generation of BPM technology.  And, of course, they will.  Gartner’s next BPM Magic Quadrant takes it for granted, requiring numerous new capabilities to achieve intelligent business operations, meaning processes driven by events, rules, and real-time analytics to sense and respond to the external environment.  The process logic is dynamic and adaptive, tailored to the demands of each instance at the moment… while retaining the ability to continuously track and monitor process performance and quality.  It’s not today’s BPM… it’s the next generation.

Now, we’ve all been to BPM conferences where we are told that “BPM is a management discipline, not a technology” and encouraged to “get executive sponsorship” and “look for quick wins.”  All true, but if you already know what BPM is, and have been putting it into practice, you’re not going to learn much about the next generation of BPM technology at those events.  Those conferences are aimed at those just getting started in BPM, but you need to be chest-deep already in today’s BPM to appreciate what’s coming next.  That means you are either an early-adopter end user, a BPM vendor, or an experienced BPM practitioner, analyst, or investor.  You care about the technology of BPM, and you want to look forward, not back.  The management discipline is essential, but you understand that going forward, these next-generation technology elements will represent the difference between process innovation and simple process automation.  If you fit that profile, bpmNEXT is for you.

Save the date: March 19-21, 2013.

bpmNEXT is a different kind of event.  It’s for BPM insiders, not for newbies.  It’s about the technology fueling the next generation of BPM… not just hearing about how cool it’s gonna be, but seeing it live, and engaging with the developer.  The presentations are short – 20 minutes, plus 10 minutes Q&A.  And the 20 minutes is mostly demo, not Powerpoint.  It’s like TED for BPM, but with plenty of lively interaction with the presenters.  We have space for about 20 presentations, which will be selected (I guess the term now is “curated”) based on submitted videos.  I expect we’ll have some of those videos on the website beginning this summer.  Submitters will link their presentations to one or more topics listed on the website.  We encourage you to comment and vote on the topics listed, and suggest your own.  This will help us “curate” the submissions.  At the end of the event, attendees will vote from their laptops and iPads on the coolest demo, Best in Show, and we’ll present a nice award to the winner.  Not to mention bragging rights over some awesome competition.

The other thing that makes bpmNEXT different is the venue, the Asilomar Conference Center on the Monterey peninsula, next door to Pebble Beach and just up the road from Big Sur.  Asilomar is not your typical conference hotel.  It’s more of a rustic retreat, perfect for the total-immersion “workshop” atmosphere of our event.  Your registration to bpmNEXT includes a room two nights and all meals from dinner on March 19 through lunch on March 21.  That’s right.  We’ll be eating and drinking together for two solid days.  The interaction will be intense, and the surroundings spectacular.  It will be an event to remember.

And that brings up the third aspect of bpmNEXT.  It’s a chance to begin to forge a community of those interested in shaping and promoting the next generation of BPM – sharing ideas, linking the pieces together, differentiating between the sizzle and the steak.  If you were at the original BPMI.org Think Tank in Miami, 2005, you remember we talked about it then, but it never happened.  Maybe bpmNEXT can help create that community.