We're at the Reston Hyatt today, for Appian World 2012. The theme of the conference is "Tap the Power of Process Innovation in the Mobile, Cloud and Social Age." There were over 650 registrations, including 230 unique organizations from 15 countries! Attendees include customers, partners, prospects, analysts, and the media.
We'll be liveblogging presentations today and tomorrow, so stay tuned. Presenters today will include Daryl Plummer from Gartner, Appian CEO Matt Calkins, and Sandy Kemsley, in addition to customer case studies and BPM training sessions. View the agenda here. You can also follow along with the conference on Twitter, and view pictures and video at Facebook.
The opening keynote was given by Daryl Plummer, Group Vice President at Gartner. His topic was "Delivering Enterprise Performance Breakthroughs with Extreme Collaboration."
What is "extreme collaboration?" It emerges from the collision of unstoppable forces: Social, Cloud, Mobile & Information. It represents a step change in business operations.
Plummer presented some interesting statistics from Gartner: Through 2016, organizational politics will prevent at least a third of BPM efforts from moving beyond one-off projects to enterprise-wide adoption. 53% of BPM survey respondents cited "organizational politics" as their #1 obstacle to further adoption of BPM. 90% of organizations that took Gartner's ITScore assessment of BPM maturity were at or below Level 2 (Coordinated Process).
Functional and hierarchical "white spaces" are critical barriers to Enterprise BPM success. In "white spaces", there's a lack of responsibility, management blind spots, and accountability gaps. This creates operative islands, which drive task optimization, not optimal business process outcomes.
Extreme Collaboration crosses the "white spaces". Cloud-based process collaboration spaces are location-independent and available 24/7 to all participants, and enable unstructured idea exchange and communities of interest.
To illustrate the concept of extreme collaboration, Plummer presented several case studies, including one from Starbucks. Starbucks created a new mobile BPM project for their store inspection process. Inspectors previously completed paper forms and keyed them in back at the office, resulting in delays and inefficiencies. With Appian BPM, inspectors now use iPads to capture in-store issues and upload pictures in real-time. This enables on-the-spot collaboration with store managers and allows the process stakeholders to take corrective actions immediately.
Practicing Extreme Collaboration means changing behavior, changing relationships, and changing engagement methods. "Traditional" BPM creates barriers -- extreme collaboration leverages natural relationships. In the words of Daryl Plummer -- "It's time to become extreme!"
