Recently, I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at IRM UK’s Business Process Management (BPM) Conference Europe, co-located with their Enterprise Architecture (EA) conference at the lovely Radisson Blu Portman Hotel in London. This 200-plus person conference with over 30 countries represented, is “designed by practitioners for practitioners.”
Technically I’m not a practitioner, but many of PMG’s customers are, and listening to them and seeing what other practitioners are thinking and presenting about is helpful in planning where our product needs to go.
The conference managed to cover some of the more talked about topics lately, such as GDPR, RPA, and “AI”, and allowed ample time for networking opportunities with practitioners, speakers, and a dozen or so vendors that were sponsoring the event.
Main takeaway: EA and BPM leaders and practitioners are looking at smart and practical ways to take advantage of emerging technologies, and pull value from the hype around RPA, “AI”, and all intelligent-related. At the same time, keeping the focus on the customer and customer value is still as important today as anything else.
One of our customers, Jon Jenkins with Kautex Textron, and I had a session, “Delivering Customer Value: Finding the Real Needs of your Customers Beyond Wish Lists.” The story focused mostly on Jon’s journey and tips for getting over a hundred processes implemented and automated, while working with his internal customers on getting maximum value and success.
All in all, it was a very fun conference to attend, and of course a fun city to visit. Keep an eye on London, there is a lot of movement and activity in the broad automation market taking place there.
Ben