Business Process Management (BPM)

AmberPoint pursues subatomic BPM app managment

AmberPoint’s new product release helps determine which business processes are getting hung up, and also points to where within the process the problem lives. When AmberPoint is implemented, it maps out the entire deploy landscape of the system it is attached to. Users can then configure it to recognize what constitutes good or poor performance so it can warn them when there is a hiccup in the process flow. Continued »

Random notes from Gartner BPM Summit in Orlando.

I was thinking … We often think of Agile as a trend within development and software architecture. But some of the tenets of this movement appear in the discussions of BPM advocates, many of them residing in Operations. SOA teams had better talk and walk the Agile talk and walk just as well as anyone … Continued »

In BPM complexity, Active Endpoints finds a middle road

Business process management systems (BPMSs) can be criticized for being either too business user-centric and lightweight, or overly technical and not user-friendly. The culture of SOA, however, is a culture of collaboration between departments and that can be useful for a BPMS to emulate.

A SOA-based BPMS targeting development teams, Active Endpoints’ ActiveVOS seeks to take a middle road approach to this problem. The company just launched the ActiveVOS 7.0 release, where it updated core technologies and streamlined the user experience a bit.

“BPM suites that focus on business users, they don’t get technical enough,” said Alex Neihaus, VP of marketing at Active Endpoints. “They become islands of computing and sit off by themselves. And with BPMS for architects and developers, the level of cost and complexity is beyond the level of what most people are willing to undertake.”

The company’s approach is to offer drag-and-drop AJAX forms using Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) 2.0 to generate executable Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) 2.0 processes. When a step is dragged into a process, the flow is automatically mapped out and can then be altered.

There is also built in support for interfacing with human processes via the WS-HumanTask standard. The BPMS supports a host of standards

Michael Rowley, the company’s CTO, said the new version would also support mashups.

 “There is a new approach to enterprise mashups,” said Rowley. “Put all of the logic for presentation on the client and have the calls go right into the enterprises services layer.”

Rowley said it is too sluggish to have mashups put in calls to data providers. Rather, he favors having the calls talk directly to the services handling the data. This keeps the data on the mashup the same as the data used by the services.

Smart Jam from IBM and a side note

IBM is announcing a new set of professional services. They include IBM Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud, IBM Mobile Enterprise Services for Managed Blackberry, and IBM Converged Communications Services.

As  part of the push, IBM will feature a Jam – a large-scale webcast that will include participation by James Surowiecki, author of “The Wisdom of the Crowds.” 

In the background, IBM is preparing another push on its Smarter Planet initiative, with a focus on the BPM and collaboration software fronts. ‘‘Collaboration’’ has been a watchword at the company’s Lotus group for a number of years but, increasingly, the collaboration is going to be posited within business processes.

There will be more handholding across the groups in IBM going forward, as the company goes to market with new vertical solutions.

Side note: Survey data disclosed by the company as part of the Smart Planet effort suggests that there is plenty of room for improvement in business processes. IBM estimates an average of 5.3 hours per employee per week is wasted because of inefficient processes. This figure somewhat dovetails with The Journal of Irreproducible Results data that suggests U.S. workers spent about 5 hours per week in recent months trying to figure out who would replace Paula Abdul on American Idol.

Appian upgrades links to SharePoint, makes portals ‘actionable’

Interest in enterprise mash-ups should not entirely dim interest in enterprise portals, should it? They may blend. They both gather disparage system data into a single view. One can adjudge that mash-ups will get more robust, and portals will get more loosely coupled and flexible, if history is a guide.  Meanwhile, BPM is moving up in the mix. An Appian-SharePoint integration is a case in point. Continued »

Garnter’s Blechar on BPM, MDM and SOA

There has been much talk about coordinating BPM and SOA. Now, add MDM to the mix. In a blog entry, Gartner’s Michael Blechar discusses a new report on the role Master Data Management plays in creating reusable, sharable data services. Continued »

Enterprise mashups poised to power app dev for masses?

The PC revolution was not IT’s doing. Adventurous end-users brought the damn things into the company, impressed most everyone, and IT finally got with the program. Back in the day, with PC tools, mere mortals (end users) could learn programming too. They only did it because they got tired of waiting in an endless line to get a new application. Are we entering such an era yet again as enterprise mashups grow? Continued »

Red Hat builds on Drools

Red Hat continues its move up the middleware stack, improving its basic rules engine, and launching rules authoring tools to open the doors of rules development to business analysts. JBoss Rules builds on open-source Drools.

The new release is said to include new tooling that makes it easier for business side folks to program rules.

How far can easy rules making go, when do the business people have to go to the Java heads to really make things happen? What do you think?

Trends in BPM and modeling

Technologies rarely evolve neatly in straight lines. Instead they bump into one another, and influence each others’ directions. Think of a rack of billiard balls when the cue ball strikes! As an example, look at the technologies that converged in IBM’s recent BPM BlueWorks, which is a modeling tool set for business processes available as a service via the cloud. To top it off, BlueWorks is built in part on IBM’s sMash Enterpirse Mash-up development tool technology. In fact, the front end of BPM, the area where the processes are modeled is very active just about now, and IBM is far from alone in innovating. Continued »

Trawling for Impact: BPM BlueWorks, IBM CloudBurst

Hey everyone, first things first: Did you give your mother a Private Cloud for Mother’s Day? Ok, now on with the show.

The blogosphere was abuzz with IBM Impact chatter last week. Much centered on the company’s announcement of the CloudBurst private cloud appliance. But there was a lot of guff about IBM’ BPM BlueWorks business modeling as a cloud service as well. There is not a full consensus on ‘what the cloud is’ or ‘what BPM in the cloud is,’ by any means. Guess that makes it interesting. Continued »