This afternoon was filled with ideas and innovation.

First I attended Forrester analyst Clay Richardson’s discussion, How Capability Maps Can Bridge the Gap Between EA & BPM – Disciplines and Technology. Clay asked the question, “Why do Enterprise Architects and BPM people never get along,” and “how do we get them to talk to each other?”

Clay said that whenever you ask a BPM person what EA is all about they will tell you, “pretty pictures,” and whenever you ask an EA person what BPM is all about – they say it’s a new way to build business applications.

But this lack of collaboration between EA and BPM is a recipe for disaster.

Clay recommended that since both groups understand capabilities, organizations should utilize capability maps as a “Rosetta Stone” to help them find a common language and to highlight weak or broken processes and also identify relationships between bad data and broken processes.

With the help of capability maps EA and BPM teams can work in better harmony to understand what the business knows today and where it is going tomorrow.

Later in the afternoon I attended Allergan Senior Analyst, Tom Holmberg’s discussion, Optimizing Processes & SOPs Utilizing Metastorm ProVision®. Tom discussed how his team is using Metastorm ProVision to create greater efficiencies by streamlining the many different processes across regions and functional groups while aligning all SOPs (standard operating procedures) within the research and development departments to make the processes, and the compliance activities associated with them, less cumbersome.

The team started creating standard processes by interviewing the many people involved in the different process variations – and then identifying the best, and most common practices and applying them to a new, universal model. From there they were able to automate, and then determine the areas where they can improve or tweak the new model. Now SOP documents are directly attributed to activities, available in the repository, and built in to the model itself so that users can easily access the proper document that applies to the action that they are performing.

Both talks were very insightful!

Today was a great day of insights and ideas, some awesome new product innovations, open forums and an overall great time spent with our customers and partners. I’m greatly looking forward to see what tomorrow has in store!

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