Blog: Craig Schiff

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BPM Summit: Business Over Technology

I've attended numerous conferences over the years and the majority have been focused on technology and products. Those events are quite valuable to see the latest and greatest technologies and to hear the best thinking from our leading IT experts (many of whom are part of the B-Eye Network). The BPM Summit held this week in Greenwich, CT, however was focused on addressing business challenges - the reason we use technology in the first place. These types of conferences can be fairly dry, but this one wasn't. The most exciting aspect was to hear from the Vision Award winners - those companies judged to have made the best use of BPM software to enhance their business performance. The list of winners was surprising in and of itself.

The Vision Award winners were: The U.S. Postal Service, Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority, and Hyatt International. What these companies had in common was strong executive sponsorship and a holistic view of BPM - from planning to dashboards all across the company. The executive from Hyatt could not attend due to the recent events in Jordan, but the two other executives told compelling stories of how BPM dramatically improved their bottom line. The U.S. Postal Service, who I usually don't think of as leading edge, was able to introduce new services while reducing staff by about 50,000 people and expenses by about 13 billion dollars! The Nashville Airport was able to prosper in a very challenging time for the aviation industry. They were even able to reduce the rates they charge airlines. These companies clearly prove that Business Performance Management (if done right) is well worth the investment of time and money.

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