After Intalio User Conference 2008 wrapped up last week I was able to get most of the presentations posted to our forum. But, I wanted to put the presentations in some sort of context. I have notes from some of the sessions and will be posting them over the coming weeks.

First off I wanted to highlight Janelle Hill from Gartner and her presentation on Business Processes: The Foundation Linking Business and IT.

Mauricio Bittencourt posted a little blurb about the session. But as my Portuguese isn't so good I will leave it untranslated. James Taylor also posted an article on his blog over at Smart (enough) Systems.

Here are some points Janelle made during her talk:

• Intalio is the only credible open source BPM vendor. jBPM is only a low-level BPM engine.[Ed. note: remember these are her words;)].
• Companies should use BPM as tool to achieve visibility to improve business decision making. Don't run businesses on guts/instincts/past history as things are changing too fast.
• Janelle cited a mortgage company as an aggressive adopter of BPM technology. Processes are well documented and transparent and metrics are clearly defined and collected such that the company feels very comfortable letting employees telecommute.
• SAP has not decided to adopt SAP NetWeaver BPM to drive internal business processes.
• BPM has about 7-year cycles. Last one started in 2000. We are at year 8, the beginning of a new cycle.
• The BPM hype peaked. Disillusion is now setting in. There is no magic bullet. Companies need planning, training, and execution to ensure a successful BPM deployment.
• Major industries adopting BPM:
  • Insurance (claim management)
  • All top banks
  • Mortgage firms
  • Government
• Some of the most common BPM deployments are customer-facing and self service
• The average commercial BPM deployment costs USD $500K to $800K. One company paid 2 million euro. [Ed. note: no wonder or customer acquisition rate is looking very hockey puck-ish these days].
• None of the major SIs are credible vendors in the BPM space at this point in time.
• There is a major opportunity for BPM SIs to step because:
  • Customers are jaded with spending large sums of money
  • Companies need to focus on process re-engineering and business transformation

If you saw the presentation I would love to hear what you got out of it. If you have any notes on any of the other sessions feel free to send them to me crow [at] intalio [dot] com and I will include them in future posts.

Other articles in this series:

1. IUC 2008 Sessions: Janelle Hill - Linking Bussiness and IT
2. IUC 2008 Sessions: Ismael Ghalimi - Intalio State of the Union