At Forrester's Business Process And Application Delivery Forum, October 7 and 8 in National Harbor, MD , we are holding a session called an "unconference" in the Business Process content track (there is also an unconference for the Application Development and Delivery track).

What is an "unconference"? you may ask. It's a session where the attendees are the presenters.  Here is how the session is described on our event site:

"Unconferences are the coolest thing going in conferences, having taken a page out of the Web 2.0 and social networking world. Here’s how it works: Upon arriving at the Forum, attendees can vote for one of these three topics: 1) the future of packaged apps; 2) the future of BPM, or 3) the role of Social Computing in business processes. Once the winning topic is announced, then it’s your turn to sign up to speak at the session. Yes, that’s right — you are the speakers! Those passionate about the topic will each have 3 minutes to discuss the topic and offer a conclusion. It should be a lot of fun, quite democratic, and full of interesting points of view. "

We need your help, whether you have already signed up to attend, considering it, or just learning about the event. What we would like you to do is select the topic that you are most interested in discussing with your peers. It only takes a minute. Vote here:

http://deploy.ztelligence.com/start/index.jsp?PIN=15Y6Y9D79ZL6V.

From the online survey, we will identify the most popular topics and present them to attendees for final selection. Thanks for your help, hope to see you at the Forum.

I get many questions from clients interested in evaluating different in-memory technologies. My first advice is not to mix apples and oranges and clearly understand the differences between in-memory indexes, in-memory OLAP, in-memory ROLAP, in-memory spreadsheets, and other approaches. See more details in my recent blog entry "I forget: what's in-memory?" to understand the differences. Then once you zero in on a particular segment, you can indeed do an apples-to-apples comparison. Let's say we pick the category of in-memory associative indexes, which would include Microsoft PowerPivot, QlikTech, and TIBCO Spotfire. We also sometimes run across Advizor Solutions, but typically in smaller clients (and we do not include them in The Forrester Wave™ process). I recommend a three-step approach to compare these four tools:

1. First, compare all of the commodity features of the vendors and tools like data integration and portal integration, operational features like administration, security, and others. You can leverage the detailed evaluation behind our slightly outdated 2008 BI Forrester Wave, if you are in a hurry, or you can wait for another month or so and the 2010 update will be published (it's in the last stages of editing at this point). Or if you are a Forrester IT client — not a vendor — client, send me a note and I'll share a draft preview with you.

Rome was not reinvented in a day. Your enterprise business processes won’t turn around overnight either. You’ll need to re-engineer processes while you continue to run an ongoing business concern — albeit one with many buried layers, some splendid ruins, and many construction projects that cause never-ending traffic snarls.

Business process optimization is not a project you can deliver in a fortnight, nor is it a specific architecture or business model. Rather, it’s an ongoing program under which you implement various transformative technical projects in order to enable greater agility, efficiency, and effectiveness throughout key processes.

What are the key components of a business process optimization program? Forrester recommends that you establish an ongoing initiative that involves all business stakeholders, at all levels in the organization. Just as important, you will need to establish tight collaboration between business stakeholders and the myriad change agents, business architects, process architects, business analysts, data stewards, and analytics professionals upon which the success of your optimization efforts depends.

Enterprises should establish cross-functional programs under which to prioritize business process optimization projects around the following key pillars:

I get a lot of inquiries asking me to name the best CRM professional services providers (PSPs). Business and IT managers worry about the cost and risk of failure when engaging consultants and systems integrators to improve the performance of their mission-critical customer-facing business processes.

Organizations entrust PSPs with important tasks – not just "screwing in software.” In a survey of 119 companies I did a few years ago: nearly 28% used PSPs to help develop their strategic vision for CRM, 42% used PSPs for defining business objectives for CRM, 44% for aligning business processes with the CRM strategy, and 56% to define the conceptual design for CRM technology solutions. PSPs were used by 60% of enterprises to establish detailed design requirements and by 64% to implement CRM solutions.

However, there are huge risks to working productively with CRM consulting or systems integration providers. In the same study, I found that four out of 10 would not recommend their CRM PSP to others after the work was completed.

I recommend that you use 12 evaluation criteria to increase your odds of success. How well does your CRM PSP stack up against these standards?