Tibco brings DIY BI report generation to BPM

Tibco will offer on Wednesday do-it-yourself capabilities for generating business intelligence reports on business processes to users of its BPM (business process management) software. With this information, users can fine-tune their applications. [ Discover what's new in business applications with InfoWorld's Technology: Applications newsletter and Killer Apps blog. ] Previously, users have had to specifically request business intelligence information on BPM from IT personnel. "The cool thing about this technology is unlike existing business integration products or BPM, this product will allow business users to directly manipulate and analyze the BPM data or the process data that's out there," said Rourke McNamara, Tibco director of product marketing. Built as an add-on to Tibco iProcess Suite for BPM, the company's Tibco iProcess Spotfire software enables users themselves to build personalized, real-time process reports. Management of business processes enables users to make businesses more efficient, he stressed.

Customized templates display reports and analyses. Featured in Spotfire are personalized reporting and analytics, as opposed to using static dashboards to display business processes. Contextual process performance data is generated that can be combined with business data from other applications, enabling process performance to be assessed in a full business context, Tibco said. While BPM is used for a wide variety of tasks, McNamara mentioned insurance claims management as an example of a use. Users can build reports on such activities as bottleneck data, process cycle time, and how quickly business participants are working. "This allows the business users to optimize those processes based on how they're being used today," McNamara said.

Tibco's iProcess software represents a convergence of BPM, business intelligence, and business rules engines, said analyst Boris Evelson, of Forrester. Another shortcoming is the lack of common metadata and metadata standards to bridge the gap between data, process and rules data, he said. This convergence, he said, was "necessary to optimize enterprise operations and create actionable insight into data and processes in order to make better strategic, tactical, and operational decisions." But the merging of the three technologies represents an immature market, which has mostly been addressed by systems integrators cobbling together bits and pieces of components from multiple vendors, Evelson said. Tibco's iProcess Spotfire software is built as a Windows client package, although a Web client is available with abbreviated capabilities, called Spotfire Web Player. The company also will roll out iProcess Workspace Lite, an HTML workspace client focused on core activities for executing business processes.

Also being offered in the Tibco BPM space Wendesday is Business Studio 3.2, which is a user interface adding capabilities for visually defining an organization's structure and relationships between different organizational components. A simple user interface in Workspace Lite enables the product to be used more easily by those with impaired vision and/or fine motor control difficulties, Tibco said. This story, "Tibco brings DIY BI report generation to BPM," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Tibco would not disclose pricing information for the three products. Follow the latest developments in enterprise applications at InfoWorld.com.