IBM revealed new versions of its business process manager (BPM) and operational decision management (ODM) software at the IBM Impact conference last week in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Announcing and demonstrating the changes, Phil Gilbert, IBM Software Group’s vice president for business process management(BPM), said that the growth of emphasis on BPM forms the beginning of a new business architecture that, over the next 30-40 years, will define the next big battle in software.

“When an enterprise system that can represent process can interact this natively with disparate information sources,” said gilbert, “I think you will see that the agility that can be gained by moving into a BPM-centric enterprise architecture – as opposed to an application-centric enterprise architecture – is going to be a very interesting conversation. It opens up pockets of innovation and agility inside your organisations that today are stymied because of the roadblocks that big application systems put in your way.”

As it is today, IBM’s Business Process Manager 7.5 only saw the light of day last year at Impact 2011 when around 20 products were integrated into BPM 7.0. Similarly, later last year, Websphere Business Events and Ilog Business Rules Management products were melded into Operational Decision Management.

At the Impact 2012 announcement these marriages were effectively consummated with more-flexible user interfaces that hint at the degree of integration that has been worked on since last year’s announcements.

Under the covers, IBM has continued with its integration work by adding linkages into the Rational application development environment. Starting with Tivoli Identity Manager, IBM is also pulling Tivoli security workflows into BPM version 8 so that enterprise-scale processes can be developed and secured.
The company has also been working with its Master Data Management(MDM) team to embed BPM into the product so information maintenance workflows can be constructed according to business rules.
The Enterprise Content Management (ECM) division has also improved the existing interface between BPM with its Case Management product so that end-users can now see across these systems seamlessly. Content management interoperability services (CMIS) capability has also been added to allow access to unstructured data stored in other CMIS-compliant databases, such as Microsoft SharePoint, Alfresco, and EMC Documentum.

A key development is that BPM 8.0 processes now work seamlessly with SAP. “We are delivering the ability for the process designer to introspect SAP to represent those processes directly in our IBM Business Process Manager platform – and interoperate with SAP at a level that no other business process management system can do,” Gilbert claimed.

Alongside BPM, IBM’s ODM product is also seeing changes. These are mainly in the way that the business rules governing decision-making structures within a company are presented to the users. IBM has incorporated a social-media-style interface which not only simplifies the user experience but also offers the kind of environment that users are coming to expect of interpersonal communications.
Searching, viewing and making changes are much more intuitive, Gilbert said. When a permission is required to make a change to protected files or sensitive information, ODM will connect with the supervising officer with the correct level of access and permissions can be granted in real time, online using an instant-messaging dialogue format.

Source:http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/ibm-launches-new-business-process-software-76835

At the ongoing Impact 2012 conference holding in Las Vegas, United States of Aamerica, the International Business Machine, (IBM) has introduced a range of new business integration software capabilities called WebSphere Application Server.

The solution, according to IBM was designed to help organizations quickly begin incorporating the collaborative and intelligent capabilities of social media, mobile computing and cloud computing into their enterprise applications.

The WebSphere Application Server said to be growing rapidily in the markest, acoording to IBM now provides clients with new flexibility for embedded deployments and is ready for cloud with built in virtualization.

This new offering provides the software platform that today powers more than 100,000 clients worldwide.

Complementing WebSphere Application Server is a range of new integration software offerings including:

IBM Business Process Manager: Combines new capabilities around social, collaboration, governance and mobile to dramatically improve the way work is done. This allows organizations to gain visibility in the ways they change, manage measure and improve the processes that run their business.

IBM Operational Decision Management: Speeds and simplifies the way that organizations manage the business rules that control a wide range of decisions across business processes and applications. The new “social media” style user interface provides an intuitive environment for collaboration and simplifies searching, viewing and making rule changes.

IBM WebSphere Cast Iron Live Web Application Programming Interface (API) Services: The solution allows companies to extend their services to support the emerging community of developers who are building new social, mobile and cloud applications. This new purpose-built offering provides a comprehensive solution to deliver, socialize and manage business API assets.

According to IBM, their client , Ottawa Hospital has already begun testing how these new software and services from IBM can dramatically change their business model.

Just recently, acording to IBM in a statement, the hospital had seen a tremendous increase in patients, resulting in higher occupancy rates and ultimately, overcrowding.

Additionally, the patients being admitted had complicated and acute symptoms, placing a greater strain on the need for coordinated healthcare delivery.

The IBM system provides extensive patient information and hospital resource availability to the clinical staff, via mobile device, at the point of care – speeding both admission and treatment.

“Physicians should be focused on patient care, not be tied up doing lower value activity, like calling for consults or trying to negotiate admission for a patient,” Dale Potter, Senior Vice President & CIO at

The Ottawa Hospital, said, adding that , “The concept behind our new system from IBM is that we are able to help our staff have one consolidated view on important data and processes, getting the right information to physicians at the right time.”

With the application, he said that the attending physician can send an electronic request to the patient’s physician for clarification on past diagnosis.

The patient’s doctor receives the consultation request immediately on their most accessible device – a tablet, smart phone or a computer. They respond directly to the specific consult questions electronically, so the attending physician can correctly diagnose the patient, he explained.

Source:http://www.vanguardngr.com/2012/05/ibm-unveils-software-with-capabilities-on-social-media-cloud-computing/