SOA virtuoso IDS Scheer unveils process governance road map

By year's end, IDS Scheer will roll out a new engine that will provide what the business process management (BPM) specialist calls “the missing governance link” in the business process life cycle.

IDS Scheer made the announcement as part of its annual ProcessWorld conference held in Orlando in February.

The new process governance offering will involve service-oriented architecture (SOA)-enabling each of IDS Scheer's ARIS products so that they constantly update the metamodel and process repository. With this capability, it will be possible to move from process modeling to tracking execution without having to export metadata, or move to a different user interface.

It also will be possible to simulate not just a process in abstract, but a specific instance of that 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 will start rolling out the new governance offerings toward the end of 2008.

In the shorter term, IDS Scheer will offer Business Performance Edition of the ARIS Platform, with several basic features that would otherwise be taken for granted in other products, such as the ability to track specific versions of business processes modeled in ARIS, and the display of parameters such as time and resource consumption of processes.

The February ProcessWorld conference meetings were capped off by a special luncheon presentation delivered by company founder Dr. August-Wilhelm Scheer. During his talk, Scheer, who also happens to be a virtuoso jazz baritone saxophonist, compared the art of jazz with managing a business process. In both cases, he said, success requires the same simple recipe: a dose of creativity and autonomy that is firmly grounded on robust structure.