In the past couple years TIBCO kind of dropped off my BPMS radar screen. They don’t put a lot into marketing, and in BPM I don’t think they had that much to say anyway. Last week I got a briefing on the new ActiveMatrix BPM, and my impression is TIBCO is finally back as a major BPM player. ActiveMatrix used to be a SOA infrastructure product and then a “brand” for a bunch of semi-related SOA products, but it now has morphed into an integrated platform for BPM and SOA. But unlike, say, IBM, TIBCO’s BPM pitch underplays the SOA grid and cloud-enabled foundation and puts the focus instead on “work management.”
TIBCO makes the case that management of human task distribution and prioritization should be independent of process management. One reason is that BPM is not the only source of tasks in the enterprise, and work management should encompass those external sources as well. When you peel the onion, the work management features mostly center around dynamic task assignment to groups and roles based on properties of the instance in combination with skills and capabilities of the task performers, based on business rules. Many BPM Suites have had such rules-based dynamic task routing for a while, but TIBCO is doing it on an enterprise scale. Their showcase work management account, a French bank called LCL, uses it to centralize distribution of back office work nationwide, instead of 29 regional offices each handling its own work. It’s not all that sexy, but TIBCO thinks that work management is its key differentiator in the BPMS marketplace.
In ActiveMatrix BPM, TIBCO has greatly strengthened the scope of Business Studio’s business analyst-friendly modeling tools used for executable design. Organizational modeling, business object modeling, and task user interface modeling all fall into that category, bringing a “business-empowering” mindset to heavy-duty SOA-based BPM. The data modeling and user interface modeling seem particularly strong.
TIBCO Business Studio supports collaboration between business analysts and process developers in design and test of sophisticated task UIs without programming. Forms can be automatically generated from the user task’s input and output parameters. Business analysts can visually change layouts and controls, and developers add validation rules and event scripts to customize the user experience and leverage the full functionality of TIBCO General Interface. The inline preview function allows playback of running forms from within TIBCO Business Studio. This Lombardi-ish approach is carried forward in page flow modeling as well, using BPMN to describe each step in the page flow… an advantage (in my view) over the programmer-oriented approach of most “enterprise-class” BPMSs.
ActiveMatrix BPM provides 3 user clients out of the box. Workspace is the Ajax-based General Interface web client that provides a rich client experience; individual components can be integrated into custom clients and portals as well. Openspace is a new gadget-based web client built using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), enabling easy creation of lightweight self-service portals. Mobilespace is a rendering of the Openspace client for mobile device, especially the iPhone. All of these clients can be customized by role and privilege to control access to page components.
ActiveMatrix BPM also represents a much better integration of performance monitoring with the BPMS. The Monitoring, Reporting, and Analytics feature collects events from the process and other sources. These events can be viewed in the Event Viewer to provide real-time, detailed monitoring of running processes and outstanding work. The Event Viewer can filter, sort, correlate and link events, making it easy to navigate the audit trail. External applications, including TIBCO’s BAM and CEP engines, can subscribe to the event stream. The event stream is aggregated into the reporting database which consolidates performance data. The Openspace client has gadgets that enable monitoring of processes, work items, and team and individual performance, providing operational monitoring out-of-the-box.
ActiveMatrix BPM Spotfire provides process reporting and analytics with advanced visualization. Business users can visually interact with performance data to develop deep insight through self-service reports and analysis, sharable over the web. Process and resource performance information can be enriched with business data from applications to understand the full impact on the business.
All in all, an impressive step forward for BPM at TIBCO.
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Bruce
The separation between process management and task assignment is an interesting point. Did they really make it possible to assign tasks from external systems?
A big weakness of TIBCO iProcess in the past was a gap between modeling and execution: the engine was able to execute less than half of what you could diagram in Studio. Did they improve here?
Kind regards
Anatoly
Very interesting. That TIBCO Product seems to be already the second BPM product that uses Tibco GI (aka Dojo GI) as their front-end platform – another one is Intalio. I’m quite curious to see the results of their collaboration in this area.
Anatoly,
I didn’t get that close a look. They said they had expanded the “workflow patterns” supported, but it seemed to be mostly resource assignment patterns. Business Studio used to provide some prebuilt fragments equivalent to BPMN patterns not directly supported. Not sure if support of native BPMN patterns is expanded or not. (It is still BPMN 1.2; BPMN 2.0 is “on the roadmap”.) The Community (free) edition of Business Studio is v3.3, and the one that supports ActiveMatrix BPM is v3.4. Maybe TIBCO (or a customer) will provide the answer.
–Bruce
Anatoly, Bruce,
Yes, ActiveMatrix BPM executes all the models in Business Studio: process, page flow, forms, business object (data) and organization. In addition, ActiveMatrix BPM also includes the service mediation models.
Jeremy Westerman
BPM Product Marketing, TIBCO
Jeremy,
Thanks for that info. I interpreted the question to be: are there BPMN event or gateway patterns you can draw in Business Studio that the process engine cannot handle? I expect there are some with almost any BPMS.
–Bruce
Bruce, nice post. Do you know if AM BPM dynamic Work Management distribution feature is smart enough to “re-redirect” work units from one user’s Workspace to another’s? I see the need for this daily, due to unplanned capacity / staffing changes in a mixed processing center. Generic example is a person ends shift early (got sick, kid misbaved at school and got sent home, priority client response took someone away from the scheduled work for a few hours). I need the ability to monitor and “rebalance” workspaces intra-day. It would be a bit help if AM now does this.
Dale,
I believe they can redirect selected work items from one person or group to another, but I don’t think they have implemented large-scale workforce management features yet. Maybe Jeremy will clarify on that. In the BPMS world, only a few products like DST’s AWD have fairly advanced workforce management features.
–Bruce
Thanks for an interesting post!
[…] while back, Bruce Silver wrote up another thorough review of a BPM vendor’s offering, and this time it was TIBCO’s ActiveMatrix BPM. There were a couple of nuggets that jumped out at […]
Any word from TIBCO about their BPMN2 support in their roadmap?
Interesting …. I’m currently working with the Global360 product set and this uses some pretty sophisticated workforce management capabilities to allow managers/supervisors real time control over people and work
Laurie