IBM will next year begin customising a set of management consoles
that let users in vertical industries monitor business
processes.
Such industry-specific dashboards represent the next iteration of
pre-built integration processes for banking, insurance, healthcare
and other sectors.
Out-of-the-box processes, for example, address a business event
such as "settle claim", and are designed to reduce the manual
coding needed for a process to execute and pull data and logic from
back-end systems.
With WebSphere Business Integration for Industries, IBM is among a
raft of application integration players pursuing process automation
aimed at vertical markets. SeeBeyond Technology, Tibco Software,
Vitria Technology, Mercator Software, Microsoft and webMethods also
unveiled so-called "solutions" packages this year.
IBM also plans to extend custom-tailoring to the management end of
process automation. Instead of offering generic dashboards to keep
tabs on process performance, IBM will design consoles for the needs
of vertical businesses, said Paraic Sweeney, vice-president of
marketing for IBM's WebSphere Business Integration products.
Sweeney provided the example of a financial trader who wants to
manage the flow of a post-trade settlement. "They want to monitor
particular accounts with whom they have service-level agreements
[SLAs] and watch transactions over a certain value," Sweeney said.
"These users want a dashboard constructed to deal with those things
specifically."
Over the course of 2003, IBM will build on its business process
management technology, gained in its acquisition of Holosofx, to
deliver dashboards that reflect varying vertical industry criteria
and terminology. Process monitoring and management comprise the
final two steps in the integration lifecycle.