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Contributed on July 17, 2015

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Knowledge Work Incentives at EACBPM

Blog: Column 2 - Sandy Kemsley

June was a bit of a crazy month, with three conferences in a row (Orlando-London-DC) including two presentations at IRM’s BPM conference in London: a half-day workshop on the Future of Work, and a breakout session on Knowledge Work Incentives, which was a deep dive into one of the themes in the workshop. I put the slides for the breakout session up on the day of the presentation, but then went off for a couple of days of holidays in Brighton and completely forgot to post a link here:

Yesterday, I read a post on The Eloquent Women called In a world of #allmalepanels, can we share pics of #eloquentwomen?, which is a riff on the Congrats, you have an all male panel Tumblr. This has been going on a long time: I wrote about the problem at Toronto’s mesh conference starting in 2007, and then just stopped attending it.

The recent TEW post had me think about the opportunities that I’ve had to present at conferences all over the world, and I decided to take them up on their challenge and post some of the pictures and videos from me presenting in the past. First, a few videos in a variety of speaking styles:

• Formal keynote: Appian World 2012 keynote
• Interview: TIBCO BPM
• Informal/ad hoc presentation: BPX Process Design Slam at SAP TechEd 2009

And some pictures taken and tweeted by audience members:

• IRM BPM, the breakout session shown above, London 2015
• Camunda BPMCon keynote, Berlin 2014
• DST Advance, Phoenix 2015
• University of Toronto panel on blogging, Toronto 2014
• BPM Portugal panel and presentation, Lisbon 2014
• BPM Global Trends, Sao Paulo 2013
• Social BPM Summer School, Como 2012

I speak primarily about technology and the impact that it has on business, and I’m recognized as an expert in my field, so I have to say that the common excuses for having no (paid) women speakers summarized here – no qualified women speakers; woman only speak about “women stuff” [wtf?]; women are more likely to say no to speaking; women are more likely to cancel – are patently untrue in my case, and likely in the case of most women speakers.

There are some shining examples of companies that put a lot of women – internal and external – on the stage at their conferences, and we need to see more of this in the future. Otherwise, you’re just ignoring half of the IQ available as speakers, and starting to alienate the attendees.