The technology standards organization OMG has painted the issue in stark relief, moreso than any other BPM conference I've attended this year. BPM is about people. People implementing, people using, people changing the way they do business. BPM products and standards have to be useful to these people... Otherwise, the product or standard is useless.

Conferences always have two things going on about them. There is a string of details, and there is an overarching theme. Sometimes, like it is here, these are at odds with one another. So it's ironic that it's OMG's Think Tank that's made it so clear that technology (and related standards) is not the key factor in business process management success.

At the conference we have discussed all the technologies, all the standards: BPMN, BPDM, BPRI, BPEL, XPDL. We've also seen presentations where frameworks were key to success...and others where the lack of a pre-defined framework was the key to success. Yet time and again, the presenters and participants came back to the key ingredients that made their real projects successful or not: the cross-functional set of people and the cultures of the companies doing the work.

Your BPM initiative must focus on creating a culture of (read: incenting) the community of people responsible for and participating in the process, and the community of partners and vendors who will assist you. These people need to be flexible and working within a process or methodology to discover, define, implement, use and improve a process in the context of business goals.

This focus on business goals and the cross-functional set of people (vendors and partners included) is required for BPM success, regardless of tools and technology. Be sure you have the right team.

- Phil Gilbert (via mobile)