Brainstorm Conference Chicago

This week was the Brainstorm Group's Business Architecture, BPM, SOA conference in Chicago. It's a 2-day conference that offered three primary tracks and combined keynote speakers.

As a business architect, it was interesting to hear the positioning by each speaker on their specific topic. While some referenced business architecture, others did not. Although most of the speakers had valuable experiences and perspectives to share, I would not have wanted to be a business architecture "beginner" at this conference.

Many of the messages were very confusing from a business architect's perspective. For instance, I heard one speaker say that, "it's all about rules," and that, "soon there will be no such things as requirements."

The next speaker stated that, "the most important thing is use case, and if you don't do them right you will fail as an organization."

Yet another speaker then stated that, "the most important thing is process. If you are not a process-centric organization, you will fail."

So, which is it? What is most important?

My answer is Business Architecture. Use cases, rules and processes are important, but none of these provide a complete picture by themselves. As a business architect, it is critical to understand how all these elements fit together, along with requirements (from a business person's point of view, not a systems view), business roles, business information, strategy and roadmaps. If your organization does not take this holistic approach to understanding who they are and what they do, and instead focuses on a narrow view, short-term fixes will result and the problems they are trying to solve today will eventually re-surface in the future, but this time from a new perspective.

Of the speakers I saw, my favorite speakers were the lady from Coors (not just because she represents beer) and William Ulrich. On the other side, the opening keynote speaker was full of theory and from a business architects perspective I did not agree with his positions, plus he had a costume on! The same guy at the New York conference in November got into a verbal confrontation with a panel member during one of the panel discussions. It got to a point that even being in the audience as I was, it became uncomfortable.

In general, I would recommend the Brainstorm Conference, but understand what it is - 3 separate conferences all presenting solutions to the same types of problems. Just like why BizArchCommunity.com was created, I could not find a single website dedicated to Business Architecture, I am still looking for that conference that is dedicated to and focused on Business Architecture. Maybe next year we host our own event.