Around the world with Signavio Live 2020
Blog: Column 2 - Sandy Kemsley
I missed last year’s Signavio Live event, and it turns out that it gave them a year head start on the virtual conference format now being adopted by other tech vendors. Now that everyone has switched to online conferences, many have decided to go the splashy-but-prerecorded route, which includes a lot of flying graphics and catchy music but canned presentations that fall a bit flat. Signavio has a low-key format of live presentations that started at 11am Sydney time with a presentation by Property Exchange Australia: I tuned in from my timezone at 9pm last night, stayed for the Deloitte Australia presentation, then took a break until the last part of the Coca-Cola European Partners presentation that started at 8am my time. In the meantime, there were continuous presentations from APAC and Europe, with the speakers all presenting live in their own regular business hours.
Signavio started their product journey with a really good process modeler, and now have process mining and some degree of operational monitoring for a more complete process intelligence suite. In his keynote, CEO Gero Decker talked about how the current pandemic — even as many countries start to emerge from it — is highlighting the need for operational resilience: companies need to design for flexibility, not just efficiency. For example, many companies are reinventing customer touchpoints, such as curbside delivery for retail as an alternative to in-store shopping, or virtual walk-throughs for looking at real estate. Companies are also reinventing products and services, allowing businesses that rely on in-person interactions to take their services online; I’ve been seeing this shift with everything from yoga classes to art gallery lectures. Decker highlighted two key factors to focus on in order to emerge from the crisis stronger: operational excellence, and customer experience. One without the other does not provide the benefit, but they need to be combined into the concept of “Customer Excellence”. In the Q&A, he discussed how many companies started really stepping up their process intelligence efforts in order to deal with the COVID-19 crisis, then realized that they should be doing this in the normal course of business.
There was a session with Jan ten Sythoff, Senior TEI Consultant at Forrester, and Signavio’s Global SVP of Customer Service, Stefan Krumnow, on the total economic impact of the Signavio Suite (TEI is the Forrester take on ROI). Krumnow started with the different factors that might be part of what a customer organization might be getting out of Signavio — RPA at scale, operational excellence, risk and compliance, ERP transformation, and customer excellence — then ten Sythoff discussed the specific TEI report that Forrester created for Signavio in October 2019 with a few updates for the current situation. The key quantifiable benefits identified by Forrester were external resources cost avoidance, higher efficiency in implementing new processes, and cost avoidance of alternative tools; they also found non-quantifiable benefits such as a better culture of process improvement across organizations. For their aggregate case study created from all of their interviews, they calculated a payback of less than six months for implementing Signavio: this would depend, of course, on how closely a particular organization matched their fictitious use case, which was a 100,000-employee company.
There are a number of additional sessions running until 5pm Eastern North American time; I might peek back in for a few of those, and will write another post if there’s anything of particular interest. I expect that everything will be available on demand after the event if you want to check out any of the sessions.
On the conference format, there is a single track of live presentations, and a Signavio moderator on each one to introduce the speaker and help wrangle the Q&A. Each presentation is 40 minutes plus 10 minutes of Q&A, with a 10-minute break between each one. Great format, schedule-wise, and the live sessions make it very engaging. They’re using GoToWebinar, and I’m using it on my tablet where it works really well: I can control the screen split between speaker video and slides (assuming the speaker is sharing their video), it supports multiple simultaneous speakers, I can see at the top of the screen who is talking in case I join a presentation after the introduction, and the moderator can collect feedback via polls and surveys. Because it’s a single track, it’s a single GTW link, allowing attendees to drop in and out easily throughout the day. The only thing missing is a proper discussion platform — I have mentioned this about several of the online conferences that I’ve attended, and liked what Camunda did with a Slack workspace that started before and continued after the conference — although you can ask questions via the GTW Question panel. To be fair, there is very little social media engagement (the Twitter hashtag for the conference is mostly me and Signavio people), so possibly the attendees wouldn’t get engaged in a full discussion platform either. Without audience engagement, a discussion platform can be a pretty lonely place. In summary, the GTW platform seems to behave well and is a streamlined experience if you don’t expect a lot of customer engagement, or you could use it with a separate discussion platform.
Disclaimer: Signavio is my customer, and I’ve created several webinars for them over the past few months. We have another one coming up next month on Process Intelligence. However, they have not compensated me in any way for listening in on Signavio Live today, or writing about it here.
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