IBM’s Next-Gen BPM Marries SOA, Model-Driven Technologies; Ships in June 
Next month, IBM will ship a major update to its BPM (business process management) offering, which unifies the best of IBM’s WebSphere SOA and integration with Lombardi’s model-driven approach. The goal is to simplify the ability to capture, discover and design complex business processes across multiple silos and stakeholders.
Next month, IBM will ship a major update to its BPM (business process management) offering, which unifies the best of IBM’s WebSphere SOA and integration with Lombardi’s model-driven approach. The goal is to simplify the ability to capture, discover and design complex business processes across multiple silos and stakeholders.
IBM’s Business Process Manager 7.5 is designed to provide end-to-end visibility into processes and operations, and will allow companies to better model, automate, monitor and adjust processes quickly -- even in-flight, Kramer Reeves, director of IBM’s BPM product marketing told IDN
“IBM Business Process Manager combines the importance of standards and enterprise class SOA and integration capabilities with the newest modeling-driven approaches for BPM,” Reeves said. “This approach brings [IT and business users] a better paradigm for how to manage change though seamless end-to-end integration and the simplicity of model-driven process design, execution and updates.”
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IBM’s BPM 7.5 takes aim at one of today’s key BPM challenges for companies, Reeves said: The need to see business processes and transactions in an end-to-end integrated view -- across an organizations and beyond to outside partners. “BPM 7.5 is designed so customers can now implement model-driven change and ensure repeatability and make updates much easier anywhere within the lifecycle, and with high reliability,” Reeves added.
IBM’s new blend of SOA and model-driven technologies for BPM projects will also deliver new levels of process flexibility, he added. “BPM 7.5 offers the rare ability to extract process out of an underlying application, so these processes can be application-independent, and be put to work in many ways because of SOA,” Reeves said.
The result of all this flexibility, he said, will be more control and granularity over processes, which in turn will lead to improvements in visibility, governance, integrity and change management, Reeves said. BPM 7.5 also allows customers to leverage exceptions for managing in-process rules and for on-going business process improvement, as it sports the ILOG’s JRules engine and ILOG’s human-centric rules language (Business Action Language)
Some highlights of IBM’s approach, from a benefit and architecture basis are:
Easy Team Collaboration --- Process Designer
- Ease of use BPMN modeling, tools for process capture, discovery and design
- Playback of processes to facilitate team collaboration
- Concurrent editing with merge-less development
- Process rules editor based on ILOG technologies
- Easy sharing of process assets (with Integration Designer)
Process Integrity and Scalability -- Process Server
- Extends WebSphere Process Server engine with integrated technologies for BPEL/BPMN, rules, monitoring,
- Includes built-in WebSphere Application Server, ESB, integration adapters and portal
- Supports end-to-end process/transactions
Repeatability & Governance -- Process Center
- Provides a single repository for all process assets
- Ensures consistent and repeatable process assets, so models can be easily reused or don’t fall out of cycle
- Access to various “toolkits” for sharing assets across process apps
- Simple 1-click “snapshot” versioning, and 1-click back-in-time snapshot views
- Centralized deployment control center. Process center is embedded into designers (Integration Designer or Process Designer) to make all assets available
End-to-End Integration, Orchestration -- Integration Designer
- Eases ability of SOA and integration devs to build reusable SOA services, orchestrating services,
- Promotes easy access back-end systems.
Visibility -- Performance Data Warehouse
- Real-time process scoreboards
- Drill-in graphical control of process status
- “Heat maps” show bottlenecks in process model
- Real-time reports delivered within process “coaches”
- Deployment dashboard shows versions in-flight
Early Adopters, Analysts See
Benefits, Promise in IBM’s BPM 7.5
Bringing together all these components for process, integration and operations is driving a range of business benefits – across design and operations, Reeves said.
Process models, once approved, can be implemented across an enterprise very rapidly, he said. “In one early case, IBM helped a customer dramatically improve a process. One it took 30 days, and now it’s reduced it to 17 minutes,” Reeves said.
Similarly Nationwide Insurance is leveraging business process and business rules to improve the efficiency of its financial reporting system, which pulls data from more than 300 subsidiaries. “With all data going through one central business rules management system, we have streamlined complex processes, allowing us to focus even greater attention on serving the needs of our customers.” said Tammy Craig, Nationwide’s VP of information technology in a statement.
At Lincoln Trust Co, officials used BPM 7.5 to automate more end-to-end processes and cut financial risk posed by mistakes, according to Helen Z. Cousins, Lincoln’s executive vice president and CIO,
Analysts are optimistic about IBM’s latest BPM architecture. Gartner analysts Janelle Hill and Michele Cantara wrote: “IBM’s radical overhaul of its portfolio of business process management products, methodologies, services and industry solutions will clear up confusion among its customers, and enable IBM to broaden its BPM market opportunity.”
James Taylor in his Everything Decision Management blog, wrote, “IBM wanted to bring the power of the WPS [WebSphere Process Server] runtime and the simplicity of the Lombardi platform while significantly improving design time governance and end to end visibility.”
Aside from BPM 7.5, IBM has other BPM initiatives. It has created a new global consulting and services practice for BPM and business rules, comprised of BPM and SOA experts. The practice will offer a new IBM Method for Business Process Optimization methodology. IBM also plans an update to its IBM Blueworks Live SaaS cloud-based BPM offering and to enhance IBM Business Monitor with integration with Cognos Business Intelligence analysis and reporting.
