BPM in Action

Earlier this month, IBM announced that it has integrated its FileNet BPM offering with Cognos 8 (which IBM also owns) and its business intelligence features. The company has also transformed its January acquisition of AptSoft into IBM WebSphere Business Events, a “BPM Suite” designed to ease and speed the integration of BPM, BI, and event processing.

Whatever one wants to say or argue about whether or not this is a suite or a portfolio, and whether or not it represents a new set of solutions or old wine in new bottles, this is a meaningful development. It demonstrates that:
1. IBM is serious about integrating its FileNet technologies with BI solutions;
2. IBM is serious about integrating event-related features and processing with BPM and BI; and
3. IBM is committed to integration of BI, BPM, and event processing with/via service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

This mirrors the continuing evolution of The Big Mash-Up in enterprises of all sizes and types. Increasingly, by my lights, anyway, users are seeing BI, BPM, and analytics as tools for answering questions about “who, what, where, and why,” event-driven features and event processing as tools for answering “when,” and SOAs as answers to “how.” A construction that may be a bit inelegant, but begins to shed light on some of the forces driving The Big Mash-Up.

And IBM isn’t the only vendor heading down this path. BEA Systems, for example, is talking increasingly about the “Event-Driven SOA.” Oracle offers an “Event-Driven Architecture Suite,” an element of what the company calls “SOA 2.0.” And there’s more to come, from familiar and emerging vendors.

This is a big and growing deal. If you’d like to read more about it, check out my Aberdeen Group Analyst Insight, “Building Event-Driven Architectures: Many Paths, One Mountain.” And if you haven’t yet done so, check out my Benchmark Study, “Performance in a Service-Oriented Architecture World,” while it’s still available at no cost for a now-VERY-limited time, as the marketeers like to say. (If you’re quick and have 10 minutes to spare, you can still take my survey on application and infrastructure monitoring and management, which entitles you to FREE copies of the SOA performance study AND the report to be based on the survey when that’s published. Such a deal, as we former Brooklynites like to say!)

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • Current Events • Enterprise Information Integration • Event-Driven Architecture • IBM • IT Infrastructure Management • SOA • The Big Mash-Up  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

As I’ve mentioned here previously, I (along with some other industry observers whose opinions I respect, sometimes more than my own) fervently believe we’re watching the colliding convergence of multiple technologies. These include, but are not limited to, BPM, event-driven architectures (EDAs), enterprise information integration (EII), information lifecycle management (ILM), master data management (MDM), and service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

This time out, I want to throw out some more detailed musings about the forces driving BPM closer to EII, ILM, and MDM. While these latter three areas are overlapping and often only vaguely defined, they all attempt to address the same core needs. As I see it, there are two that matter most.

Need the First: The ability to base every business action, decision, and process on the most accurate, consistent, secure, and timely information available, without fail.

Need the Second: The ability to answer the “Journalism 101” questions about that information – who’s using what, when, where, why, and how – accurately and completely, on demand at any time.

These are the needs underlying increasing industry focus on “one version of the truth,” a phrase cited frequently by those focused on tasks or goals such as data quality or management of customer or product information.

But meeting these needs as completely and consistently as possible is also essential if BPM is to succeed and deliver maximum business value. Processes developed, enforced or revised based on inaccurate, inconsistent, or just plain wrong information are opportunities to make what we called sardonically in my young analyst days “career-limiting decisions.”

But don’t just take my word for it. Recent survey-based research conducted by me and my august colleagues at Aberdeen Group finds that companies using or planning MDM know more about “time to information,” the time between business activity and delivery of useful information to decision-makers, than those with no MDM activities or plans. Aberdeen research also finds that most companies are pursuing EDA plans, and that those companies also pursuing SOA and/or MDM plans are going after EDAs more aggressively.

Now, even if you could build an EDA or an SOA without BPM, I’m not sure I’d want to see the results. And even if you have no plans for EDAs or SOAs, the more business-critical your processes become, the more they require effective management, and the more that management requires the best information available.

Drop me a line if you’d like to see the Aberdeen research I’ve mentioned. Also please drop a line or post a comment if you’re pursuing BPM initiatives in concert with EII, ILM, and/or MDM, or if you have supporting or contrarian ideas about this particular element of The Big Mash-Up.

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • Enterprise Information Integration • Event-Driven Architecture • Information Lifecycle Management • SOA  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)

Dennis Byron, my new ebizQ BPM “blogmate” and one of my favorite pundits, wrote recently about Appian and Enterprise Rent-a-Car. I love the idea of “renting BPM,” and agree with Dennis completely that it’s something we could sooner rather than later, and not necessarily just from Appian.

I found another recent announcement equally interesting. In February, Vitria announced M3O, an environment it claims “empowers business users to directly model, manage, monitor and optimize their business processes.”

If you talk with senior executives at other BPM companies, as I have done recently, you hear several terms and variations repeated with increasing frequency. A distillation of what I’ve heard, without quite so much release-related rigor, comes out very close to the Vitria announcement.

That is to say, what users apparently want and need – or at least what vendors think users want and need now – is the ability to model processes, then execute those model processes immediately and directly, with as much IT cooperation as available and as little required IT intervention as possible.

A single view of the process, the data it accesses, and its effects, in a secure “sandbox” that allows near-real-time manipulation and optimization, without disrupting business operations. Rapid collaboration between and among the businesspeople driving processes and the IT people managing the infrastructures that enable those processes.

You get the idea. Think of it as a kind of “BPM Live.”

Now, Vitria’s not the only vendor of BPM or related solutions pointing in this general direction. I expect to see more such announcements soon and frequently, especially as more “rental”/software-as-a-service (SaaS) alternatives for BPM and related functions appear. I think you should expect the same, as part of what I, Joe McKendrick and other members of the “punditocracy” appear to be predicting with greater frequency – something I’m calling, at least for now, “The Big Mash-Up.” That’s BPM, plus event-driven architectures (EDAs), enterprise information integration (EII), information lifecycle management (ILM), master data management (MDM), and service-oriented architectures (SOAs), among other significant IT initiatives.

Research I’m conducting at Aberdeen Group is unearthing high levels of interdependency and “cross-pollination” among such efforts. You can read more about it in the recent Aberdeen reports I wrote on EII and SOA performance, both of which are available at no cost at the Aberdeen Group Web site for, as they say, a limited time only.

More to come on this. Lots more. Stay tuned – and make sure to make Dennis feel welcome, too!

Posted by mdortch in BPM • Business Knowledge Management • Current Events • Enterprise Information Integration • Event-Driven Architecture • Information Lifecycle Management • SOA • Software as a Service  |  Permalink  | Comments (0)  | TrackBacks (0)