You’re probably saying, wait a minute, didn’t they already have one? Yes, I admit, they were in the 2006 BPMS Report series, in which they agreed (reluctantly, I hear) to let the combination of WebSphere Modeler, Monitor, WID, and Process Server be described as a BPM Suite. But today at Impact here in Las Vegas they actually announced it as an orderable thing. Sort of…
One of the problems for BPMS at Big Blue has always been that the required components cut across IBM brands, which appear to resist integration with each other. So WebSphere had its BPM story, FileNet (Information On Demand) had its own, and I suppose so did Lotus and Rational, as well. Last year IBM marketing decreed WebSphere and FileNet would be presented as a single BPM story, but they never succeeded in getting an analyst to tell it… including me. Because there wasn’t a single story to tell. (That’s what has delayed IBM’s inclusion in the current BPMS Report series, and I met another BPM analyst here who told me his own IBM BPMS report is currently stuck in the mud on the same issue.)
So what is the new offering announced today? It’s called the “IBM BPM Suite” (look ma, no branding!) and it includes both WebSphere and FileNet (with some Rational and Lotus, as well). Does that mean they’ve finally integrated the components? Not really. The new suite “includes a choice of two foundational ‘Starter Sets’ that make it easier for customers to get started with BPM.” One of those starter sets is WebSphere Modeler, Monitor, and Fabric (which includes parts of WID and Process Server). The other is FileNet. Other suite components, including the model repository (Rational Asset Manager), some Lotus collaboration stuff, a new Business Event Processing tool based on another recent acquisition, are labeled “extended value offerings.”
Clearly IBM is interpreting the word “suite” to mean a portfolio rather than an integrated platform. So I doubt the new marketing spin by itself is going to do anything. But the mini-briefing I got on this suggests there might actually be something new here, with Fabric playing a more central role. One of my biggest complaints about the WebSphere BPM story has been the jarring discontinuity between Modeler and WID – different process metamodels, different data models, different programming models, no roundtripping. The new story is that Fabric, formerly known as Webify, is a business-friendlier front end that enables “policy-based service composition” and hides the developer-centric guts of WID and Process Server. I am going to need an actual briefing on this before it makes sense, but here is the marketecture diagram from the keynote:
IBM also throws a small bone to BPMN, saying Modeler will support a new “BPMN visualization format.” Somehow that is not quite saying Modeler will support BPMN. I suspect a bit of BPMN hand-waving like BEA does with AquaLogic BPM today. But IBM is a major player shaping BPMN 2.0, and there is no doubt that standard will play a key role when it emerges in 2009 (or later). The WebSphere piece of the new BPMS is a tweak of v6.1. It should be available later this quarter.
***Correction added April 9: I got a demo of Fabric today and, to correct the post, it does not replace WID and Process Server. It adds a new Service Composition perspective to WID, and it will be linked in to Modeler as well. Fabric allows service endpoints to be selected dynamically at runtime based on policies, and allows business users to tweak policy parameters at runtime (similar to rule maintenance applications in the business rules arena). You still need to go into WID to edit the BPEL, SCA assembly diagrams, and other things that make IBM’s BPM development so foreign to the business side. In the future I think IBM is shooting for direct deployment from Modeler (including the Fabric Service Composer) without dealing with WID… but I don’t think 6.1.2 is promising that.
Looks like we’re still leaving the most important part out – the part of the end-to-end monitoring and response to any events captured via the BPM suite. The hard part is the alignment of the orchestrated business processes and activities to the underlying IT infrastructure. We’re also leaving out the core, consolidated, end-to-end visualization with real time and historical performance insight. Bridging the “BPM Suite” organization with the “IT Monitoring and Operations” organizations is another significant challenge.
We still need a definitive story around the “B” word (Business) and all of the associated TLA’s. (BSM, BAM, BPM, BTM, eieio)
It’s great to consolidate the core BPM capabilities into one suite, but we’ve still got a long ways to go IMO.
Doug
http://dougmcclure.net
Event monitoring not left out. Once again, IBM suffers from an embarrassment of riches there. I mentioned WebSphere Monitor and the new Business Event Processor, both part of the “BPM suite.” But you are correct in that Tivoli – another of those IBM brands – operates in its own universe separate from BPM. Reasonable people might disagree whether IT infrastructure management is part of BPM or not. I don’t think it is, myself, but you make a good point.
The most frustrating problem that I find with IBM is the complexity of suite. It is not a single product rather a stack of software products which do not provide a single view to the user. They have different design and runtime environments with broken handovers from modeling to execution environment (import/export of models). This leads to disjointed development (no more collaborative approach) and troublesome round trip engineering. Besides there are multiple modelers (WebSphere Integration Developer, WebSphere Business modeler) and products with overlapping features which makes the entire product stack overkill to the business user. All this not only results in loss of productivity and high maintenance but also the learning curve is steep. The user should first learn how to integrate a plethora of components and tools before focusing on the actual problem at hand.
Arsalan,
Your comments are on target and a fair assessment of IBM’s BPMS today. From talking to various IBMers here at Impact – engineering, marketing, and product management – I get the feeling they know what they need to do to streamline business-IT collaboration in the process implementation lifecycle, but it will take time. They say 6.1.2 will be a significant step forward.
–Bruce
I’m not necessarily talking about IT management, but at some point this stuff has to be operationalized. When (and if) we get to a point of easily instrumenting business processes and activities and generating meaningful events from them, who will respond to them? Who will create a trouble ticket? Who will determine why there’s a problem?
Someone will ultimately need to cross the gaping void between business and IT to determine what application server, ESB, MF, transaction, or other fancy SOA component(s) are the ones causing the end-to-end business process to fail.
If we don’t help our clients close the gap and work towards establishing a tighter business-IT alignment from the TOP to the BOTTOM of the organization, what good does the BPM Suite provide us? We’ll all still be pointing fingers at the various organizational silos as the business loses $1M in new sales.
(I specialize in Business Service Management (BSM) for IBM Tivoli and this is what I’m trying to get pushed through from where I sit on the bottom of the totem pole working with clients around the world on this stuff.)
Doug
http://dougmcclure.net
Doug,
Good points. What in your opinion does IBM’s BPMS need in order to provide this? I’m not even on the totem pole, but I talk to people up there a ways.
–Bruce
I’m by far an expert in IBM’s BPM Suite or tools, but I take a simple path here. These tools exist to orchestrate and gain visibility into complex business processes and activities within companies. At some point, the BPM Suite must integrate and align with some level of the IT Operations organization for inclusion into the broader service management story.
For example, every orchestrated business process must reside in some form of a repository. Call it a CMDB if you’d like, but something like a business process repository is probably more realistic (I’m sure there’s an official term for this IRT BPM). Inside of this repository, key information about the business process must be stored. Fundamental relationships between the business process and what they do for the business (sales, finance, order entry, provisioning, etc.), the impact they have on the business if problems occur (loss of revenue, sales, customers, etc.) must be captured. The DIFFICULT task of aligning every business process and step to actual IT infrastructure is the most critical. Performance, capacity, volumetrics, KPI/KPM, etc. should also be captured for reference by other tools in analytics activities.
Each and every business event deemed worthy of leaving the BPM Suite towards the IT Operations organization must contain the key information from this business process repository. The events should be capable of clearly communicating their impact on the business process and the business. Linkages from the event back into the repository would allow collection of additional information to tie things back to the underlying IT infrastructure. Business application, process and service models would be created in a product such as Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) that consolidate all available information into a concise visual presentation that easily communicates to the IT support organizations (and Line of Business) what the problem is, what it impacts, and how to proceed in resolving the problem (or escalating it to a domain specific group).
Our story has generally stopped at sending the events from one silo to another. I’m sure our approach will be the use of a probe to receive Websphere Business Events or CEI events. This just isn’t enough. It’s got to be carried all the way up into the consolidated business service management layer and backed up with training and process creation to ensure IT knows what to do when a business event occurs. If you design a fancy business process or activity in a Websphere product, that should be exported in some standard format (XML, BPEL, etc.) and consumed by TBSM to automatically create a representative model ready for event consumption. IT must know that this business event is the most important one, and speak to IT in a language that they understand (generally that this server is down, etc.). At some point the Tivoli Common Data Model (CDM) must be extended to capture business processes and activities and those IT relationships. This enhances the “single source of truth” for IT and this data then becomes available to other products such as the Tivoli Serivce Request Manager (TSRM) for ticketing, change management, etc.
Of course this isn’t just a product sell, this comes through a business aligned, top down business service management strategy that’s brought to life in the products, people and processes for each client.
Sorry for rambling, just wish I could make things like this happen from where I sit.
Doug
http://dougmcclure.net
You really should take a closer look at the integration between WebSphere Business Modeler and Rational Asset Manager. Also the integration between WebSphere Integration Developer and Rational Asset Manager. This isn’t just marketing hype. Each of these products can submit and search and retrieve their assets from Rational Asset Manager. They can also relate the these assets to others in the organization so that you can do impact analysis.