At the end of the first day of ARIS ProcessWorld Dr. Wolfram Jost gave an overview of the latest product developments. He provided some new details about the ARIS integration in SAP.
Dr. Wolfram Jost, who is responsible at IDS for all product developments, started his talk by distinguishing technical and business BPM. On a first glance this is a little bit surprising, because do really two kinds of BPM exist? However, he uses this idea of two different BPMs, because many customers are confused by offerings from middleware vendors like SAP, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft on one side and the BPM offering by IDS Scheer. In his view, technical BPM only focuses on automating business processes, whereas IDS Scheer’s view on BPM is continuously managing business processes. Such a continuous business process management encompasses automating business processes through technology, but it should not be limited to it.
Dr. Jost went on with examples how to motivate BPM efforts to senior management. Instead of talking IT, one should focus on the benefits achieved by the improvements like higher growth in revenue and profit.
He also had an interesting point about process optimisation vs. resource optimisation. Optimising business processes might mean removing unneeded steps, but if it is approached from a resource perspective, it often just ends up with lowering costs. Therefore, he suggests not making the chief financial officer (CFO) of a company also the chief process officer (CPO). The listeners reacted to this statement with spontaneous applause.
The main part of his talk was on new features to be expected in ARIS. First, he clarified the relationship between SAP’s Galaxy and ARIS. As we have already discussed that here on the blog some days ago, I’m not repeating this here in detail. The ARIS integration in SAP will be intensified in the next months. For example, the ARIS-ESR integration is expected to be released till end of 2008. He also announced an integration between ARIS and Galaxy. We will come back to this in a later post in the next weeks here on the blog.
Besides SAP, there are also other new features to be expected. Currently, our engineers are working on a governance engine. This governance engine will allow customers to define and execute governance processes in ARIS. The engine is not meant for operational processes like those deployed on middleware from SAP, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft. A typical example of such a governance process is IT architecture management. When an IT system gets changed, the system owner must be notified to approve the changed system description. This workflow can be modelled in ARIS and executed with the ARIS governance engine.
There will also be new features in ARIS Business Publisher. The features will allow free slicing and dicing of the ARIS content and provided enhanced visualisations. Here, the objective is to get more value out of the content stored in the ARIS repository.
The ARIS Business Performance Manager will be improved as well. It will get a new technology called inMemory database allowing real-time analysis. It will also feature so called mashups. A mashup allows users to define new analytics within 20 to 30 minutes. No IT support is needed for that. First demos of this technology will be shown during Cebit 2009.
