Our first Virtual Customer Event - What a ride!

I had the honor to occupy ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ and prepare some meals. As you may have read I invited Caspar Jans to join me. We have a long history of discussing our passion for BPM on an enterprise-level so we chose the subtitle: „EMS - perfect nutrition for your business transformation combining best ingredients from strategy to process mining” where EMS stands for “Enterprise Management Systems” and collected some questions to stimulate the dialogue with party guests:

Not knowing where this would lead us we prepared a vast collection of slides on all aspects of an integrated BPM setup covering Business Strategy, Operating Models down to Execution. Additionally we had a demo system to show-case the methodologies and tool capabilities.

So yes, we were well prepared, but it all came slightly different:
In the course of the next 2,5 h ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ was at all times occupied by a minimum of 7 people and although - or maybe just because - we were in constant dialog with the guests we only presented 1(!) slide:

The Big (BPM) Picture was all we needed and astonishingly - as far as I remember - nobody questioned the benefits of working on an integrated approach for the Big Picture. It was interesting to hear the different stages of implementation from the guests and their approach on introducing new topics such as Process Mining and RPA into their given BPM setup.

The most striking point for me was the intensity in discussions revolving around the importance of ‘Ownership’ to make BPM successful.

Which level of sponsorship is required?
How can Process Ownership be established in an otherwise hierarchical organization?
How to create business engagement (and ownership) if the BPM was set up as part of IT?
How can successful pilots be anchored sustainably into the organization?

Just to mention a few questions we elaborated. This clearly shows how far the topic BPM has evolved in a corporate setup. I doesn’t seem so long ago that the discussion would have been focussed on “EPC vs BPMN”, or “Which tool is best for BPMN modeling.” !

Many thanks therefore to all guest which made this party special by sharing their experience and thoughts and last but not least a special thanks to my Co-Host Caspar.

Hope to meet you soon again - hopefully in ‘real’.

Yours

Russell Gomersall