February 14, 2008

By year end, IDS Scheer will roll out a new engine that will provide what it calls the missing governance link in the business process life cycle. The company made the announcement as part of its annual Process World conference just held in Orlando.

IDS Scheer is a BPM vendor whose primary claim to fame is that its process models made the world safe for SAP (and probably vice versa). Unlike most of its BPM rivals, IDS Scheer differs in that it targets modeling and measurement, but leaves process execution to enterprise applications instead of providing its own. But the piece that has been lacking until now is a way to fully close the loop on the process life cycle, from simulating individual instances of specific processes to tracking their performance.

By the end of the year, IDS Scheer will SOA-enable the various ARIS tools so that they all update the process metamodel concurrently. More importantly, without having to perform any imports or exports, you will be able to work with a process at any stage of the life cycle. For instance, once it has been modeled, you can test specific versions of the process, not just in general, but for a specific use of the process.

And, once the process executes via SAP or Oracle ERP, Microsoft BizTalk, or through integration middleware platforms such as Tibco Rendezvous, the new ARIS governance layer will grab results and present it in a dashboard or generate the appropriate exception reports. Although IDS Scheer already offers most of these capabilities, they are not accessible through the same user interface. The company plans to begin rolling out the new governance offerings starting at year end.

In the meantime, next month’s months refresh of the ARIS toolsets will introduce several features that are taken for granted in most business tools: the ability to version, WYSIWYG report designer, and the ability to display time lines in your BPM process models.

According to Wolfram Jost, who heads product development, IDS Scheer came later to versioning for one reason; unlike most other data-driven business tools which tend to be file-based, the ARIS toolset is object-based. That made the task of version tracking far more complex.

Maybe it's not surprising that the ARIS toolsets are only now taking in usability features that are otherwise common in the rest of the market. Like the ERP systems that it supports, the ARIS tools have always taken a more top-down approach to architecting processes at enterprise level. As such, the focus has been primarily on mapping to enterprise applications so as to rationalize the implementation process.

But what was interesting about the week was the juxtaposition with the JBoss World user conference, which was held just across the hall in the same hotel. Somehow, we don't get the impression that the IDS Scheer folks, whose target demographic of enterprise business process architects could not be more different than the diehards of open source development, who look like the unwashed masses by comparison. At one conference, you have people who visualize the big picture; at the other, developers who are more concerned with getting an efficient command line shell interface.

In a special lunchtime presentation, company founder Dr. August-Wilhelm-Scheer made an interesting point comparing the similarities of playing straight-ahead jazz and managing a successful enterprise: both require a combination of creativity and improvisation atop a sound process structure (you can find more about that talk here). To that, we’d add a thought inspired by the presence of all those open source enthusiasts: that often times, it makes sense to collaborate

Across organizational boundaries, if that gets you the right tool to do your job quickly.

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