Last week I was at CeBIT, one of the biggest IT fairs in the world. My colleagues and I had very interesting discussions and meetings. For the first time, we had a combined booth showcasing all products and services offered by IDS Scheer and Software AG.
If you are at such a big fair as exhibitor, a lot of strange things happen. For example, at one point I was demoing the integration of ARIS Express and ARISalign to a group of Asian visitors. While talking, I was constantly filmed by one of them with a camcorder. Not sure what they are going to do afterwards with the tape, but I hope I’m never invited to a "Watch my 10 hours CeBIT recordings" evening :-)
Besides many interesting talks, there was one group of visitors, which really surprised me. At some point, a complete high school class visited my booth together with their teacher. The students were from a commercial high school from the Hannover region. Unfortunately, I was not able to grasp the name of the school. In their school, the students attend courses about business administration and production industry. As part of those courses, they are introduced to business process management in general and process modelling in particular. I shortly showed them how to model a process in ARIS Express, but also motivated why it is useful. One of the students even asked about the relationship between process modelling and SAP. Of course, I also showed the wonderful "Super ARIS Express" model so that they know BPM is fun!
I didn’t expect that even such young people care about BPM. They were probably in the 10th or 11th grade. Still, it shows that BPM is gaining more and more attention, because visualising how a company operates is a very useful task. Good to know that ARIS Express is free-of-charge so that every company can afford it!