Well, I survived the BPX community day. I always see these events a something like London Fashion Week for IT people. Watching all those great concepts, up and down the catwalk, not that everyone else will see anything like that in the shops any time soon.
For me, if there was any doubt that BPX has come of age and is a defineable discpline in its own right it has been assuaged today. Why? Besause we saw the BPM tools working together with the eSOA architecture, and it was impressive. The impression I received was that the "next level" in delivering solutions to a business will arise from these tools acting as an enabler to the desire to bring together different systems that deliver a competitively differentiating process.
But "desire" is a funny word to use in this context. It's short of "need" or "imperitive". But desire means something that can be postponed, and this might happen to all sorts of great ideas unless the benefits are taken up. I guess this one of the roles for a BPXer.
And what of this "next level"? I could liken an earlier IT expert's role as changing up the the ISO communication model, with level 1 as the physical description (i.e coaxial cable) up the levels describing data format and communication protocols (can't remember them all now!) up to level 7, which is the business to business process protocol. All the complexity is hidden from the day-to-day role, as it's it still required but ably handled by the tool you're using. NetWeaver BPM would sit above the whole stack - in effect all the complexity is out of sight.
The insight got from the day, listening, talking, challenging in a small room to some of the people charged with making this happen, made for a great event. I'm glad I went. But like London Fashion Week, I can only hope I'll get to see the promise delivered.
