Business Transformation Conference

Submitted by kswenson. System Architects.

I just spent a week in Washington DC at the Business Transformation Conference put on by Transformation+Innovation. It is a small conference, but an amazing collection of speakers. For example:

  • Dennis Wisnosky who is the Chief Technology Officer of the Department of Defense and he talked about his challenges of using SOA and BPM to transform the IT infrastructure of a $500B organization. One key point he made was to "work with platoons (8 people), not battalians."
  • Dale Meyerrose, the Associate Director of National Intelligence and Chief Information Officer, spoke about efforts to integrate informations systems across the intelligence agencies. He says "ultimately, all problems are people problems." He also gave the advice: "Think Big, Start Small, Fail Small, Fail Small, Fail Small, Succeed Small, Scale Fast."
  • Paul Strassman, the George Mason University Distinguished Professor of Information Sciences, (Former Chief Information Officer of Xerox) spoke about how HP was using SOA to cut the total number of enterprise applications deployed to one quarter as many, decreasing IT budget spend, while at the same time being more productive. Did you know that HP is now bigger than IBM?
  • Jon Pyke, president of Process Factory gave an entertaining talk about refocussing business processes back on humans. He used the first six minutes of his speach to play a video which everyone should really watch, and think about: http://www.mkpress.com/ShiftExtremeGoogle.html.

And there were many more (which I did not, unfortunately get to attend).

The WfMC held a meeting in the midst of all the coming and going. This started with a well attended full day tutorial about workflow/BPM standards and architecture. This was videotaped so hopefully this will be available on the web soon as an on-line training course.

The Workflow Handbook 2007 was launched there on Monday. It is the best one ever, and a great source for someone to get an edge on many details of this sometimes overwhelming technology.