Real-Time Business Process Management Hitting Its Stride

By Arthur C. Cole

TMCnet Contributing Editor

 

The hunt for more efficient and effective ways to extract valuable business information from the reams of data flying through the typical enterprise continues in force, leading to a wide variety of vendor partnerships and technology innovations.

One of the hottest developments in the business performance management field is real-time analytics, which allows business managers to gain critical insight on everything from network configurations to supply chain operations.

Organizations that have deployed IBM’s (News - Alert) new Information Server platform, for example, have a new real-time analytical tool in the form of the Applix (News - Alert) TM1, which the company bills as an in-memory business performance application due to its ability to allow users from across the organization to perform predictive analysis based on enterprise-wide data sets.


“Analysis is only as good as the accuracy and timeliness of the data,” said Ed Gromann, vice president of services and alliances at Applix, in a press release. “IBM Information Server guarantees the accuracy and reliability of heterogeneous data, which becomes the foundation for business analysis, while Applix TM1 delivers that information in the fastest, most timely manner possible.”

The TM1 provides a range of performance management functions, such as strategic business planning, budgeting, and reporting and analysis of financial, operational, sales, employee and other operations.

A key feature is the What-If Analysis module, which allows operators to create and evaluate a variety of scenarios based on ever-changing data sets. The system enables analysis of past performance, current business conditions and future potentialities using real-time modeling techniques.

Allowing employees to make better use of data is one thing. Getting disparate systems to share data across entrenched silos is another, particularly if business conditions require real-time management.

That is the goal of the latest version of TIBCO’s Collaborative Information Manager (CIM). The company is aiming to leverage new service-oriented architecture (SOA) technology for Master Data Management (MDM) applications.

CIM 6.0 draws information and application functionality from individual silos into a web services layer, where it can be reorganized into usable business solutions, providing such things as global risk assessment, up-sell and cross-sell applications and streamlined trade reconciliation.

“Most of the attention to SOA deployments has gone into Web service creation, deployment, and management standards and technologies,” said Neeraj Gokhale, general manager of enterprise information management at TIBCO in a prepared statement. “However, if data is inconsistent across applications, it will be increasingly difficult – if not prohibitive – to build heterogeneous SOA services that cut across multiple systems and departments.”

TIBCO designed the system with broad integration capabilities, plus multi-domain capabilities and a a robust business rules and workflow engine to enable a single reference source for mission critical data on products, customers and vendors. It is built on the J3EE Web application standard with an Asynchronous, JavaScript and XML (AJAX) interface.

“Master data management (MDM) is becoming a business imperative for many organizations and is increasingly being designed for service-oriented architecture environments,” said David Newman, research vice president of information infrastructure at Gartner (News - Alert) in a press release. “In this capacity, we see MDM helping organizations to expose a layer of business services to achieve consistency, accuracy and integrity of information assets in support of key customer initiatives.”

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Arthur Cole is a freelance journalist specializing in the high-tech communications and information field.