Intelligent Enterprise

Better Insight for Business Decisions

RSS
Webcasts
Whitepapers
Subscribe
Home

December 5, 2001

Painting by the Numbers

Is it wishful thinking to make business process management the new hook for EAI?

by Justin Kestelyn

Based on the new direction of leading enterprise application integration (EAI) middleware companies, IT executives should be ready and willing to "turn over the keys" of enterprise business processes to business users. I'm not so sure.

Companies such as WebMethods Inc., Vitria Inc., SeeBeyond Technology Corp., and Tibco Software Inc. are adding (or have already added) highly graphical business process management (BPM) interfaces to their platforms that are designed in varying degrees to make the monitoring, manipulation, and even development of business process rules (and hence enterprise application links) routine. In WebMethods' case, a parallel goal is to create a specification (developed in cooperation with Hewlett-Packard) that will let customers use their systems management platform to monitor the "health" of business systems and processes beyond traditional baseline measures.

In every case, the professed goal is to transform traditional EAI into a user-friendly business tool. But I'm skeptical. Business users have just barely begun to do their own reporting, and now we're expecting them to fine-tune the enterprise like a piano (without any music training, as it were)?

THE PLAYERS

Vitria was somewhat of a leader in this effort, having included a business process monitoring component called Real-Time Analysis (RTA) in BusinessWare 3.1 (released in Q4 2000). The core of that functionality was a feature called Process Analyzer, which would identify process exceptions by means of continually tracking business processes and benchmarking them against company metrics. The result could be an email alert to business managers as well as feedback to the platform's BPM engine.

Vitria later extended that functionality with a product called Business Cockpit, which gives business managers role-based, graphical views of realtime process information, as well as the ability to do drill-downs and create historical reports. However, Business Cockpit failed to completely close the loop in that it does not serve as a live interface through which managers can manipulate business processes. (In its collateral, Vitria likens Cockpit users to "fighter pilots," but in this case, they don't have the ability to pull the trigger.)

SeeBeyond was also a comparatively early fan of BPM, having gradually thickened the BPM layer in its eGate platform over time. The latest iteration of this feature, eInsight, is true to form for this category in its devotion to "abstracting" EAI for business users.

Now the other heavyweights in this category, Tibco and WebMethods, are also emphasizing their BPM capabilities. Tibco's new release of ActiveEnterprise (4.0) includes a graphical BPM interface that supports a wizard-driven paradigm for the code-free development and deployment of business processes. And WebMethods recently announced a Global Business Visibility Workbench, which, if delivered as advertised, will provide similar capabilities.

WHO'S RUNNING THE ASYLUM?

In all these efforts, realtime analytics have a principal role in that they will support the decision-making processes that drive this new "paint-by-the-numbers" brand of BPM. That raises interesting partnership opportunities for data integration and business intelligence vendors (Informatica Corp. is an early entrant in this contest). And as Web services become a more common means of B2B application integration, analytics will be crucial for enforcing mission-critical service-level agreements.

Rate This Article

Comments:

Optional e-mail address:

If they deliver, the EAI vendors will have made a lot of progress in supporting the development of intelligent enterprises. But considering that cultural barriers have commonly stymied less transformational initiatives such as customer relationship management, it's possible that in BPM's case, business issues will trump technology deployment yet again.

It's simply hard for me to imagine the typical business user grasping the potential utility and power of point-and-click BPM without considerable intervention from IT — which, of course, is exactly what these solutions profess to avoid. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong.