2015 BPM & Case Management Conference

There was a strong surge of energy in this conference which has grown 20% over last years inaugural conference. The content was rich for all in the audience. If your angle was linking new digital efforts to business architecture, there was a rich vein of content. If your interest was in modeling there was a strong thread of modeling sessions around process, case and decision modeling. If your interest was around emerging digital technologies such as big data, the IoT, robotics, process mining, machine intelligence and the man/machine interface, there were sessions to please. If you wanted success stories, they were there. If you wanted to understand the opportunities in case management & BPM, there were sessions to please. The content available at this conference was as rich as any I have seen to date. I will highlight some of my favorite sessions and hope you might find the descriptions useful.

Linking Business Architecture to Processes:

There was a keynote session presented by Mathias Kirchmer on his BPM - D method for identifying the processes that differentiate an organization and how to link them to results and outcomes. While there were many great sessions on business architecture, this session emphasized completing the architecture in a more complete way for business differentiation. The most interesting tool vendor, for me, was Trisotech as they had a dynamic integrating tool that leveraged a repository that had the links between architecture and execution.

Process, Case & Decision Modeling:

There were several sessions describing how to model and integrate standard modeling notations (BPMN, CMM & DMN). For organizations starting their BPM/Case journey, modeling is a common entry point and generally leads to a linking to business architecture over time.

Emerging Digital Technologies:

One of my favorite sessions was given by Dr Chuck Webster on the linkage of medical processes with the IoT by leveraging wearable technologies. Chuck went on to explain how devices could be attached to patients for real time status and how wearables + RFID could be used to manage hand cleaning and other disease prevention. Chuck the pulled out his pocket robot, Mr RIMP, to show how robots could be used in a pediatric setting to settle kids. He showed a video of interactions with Mr RIMP that was hilarious. https://youtu.be/ull1cojGouA

I really enjoyed the process mining session by Dr Anne Rozinart of Fluxicon on using visual and animated cases that run through a discovered process model by measuring actual paths of cases/ process instances. This way the real deviations from the planned model and actual execution can be tracked and choke points can be identified.

An enticing session was presented by Quantiply and one of their clients (to remain anonymous) where big data was leveraged to identify real time events and event patterns to react to problems and even predict where issues my occur. Interesting.

Personal Touches: 

I really enjoyed hanging with my son David, Tim Price and Chuck Webster who put together a mini synthesizer leveraging a little bits kit (a Lego approach to creating composite electronic devices). Tim tried to play "Stairway to Heaven" with some success :) See below for a pic of Dave and Chuck

I was also given the 2015 Marvin L. Manheim Award For Significant Contributions in the Field of Workflow. It was a very nice recognition of my passion to drive BPM & Case into the new digital organizations.