In early December, Pegasystems will introduce its Control and Compliance Framework. This is a framework for implementing all kinds of compliance solutions, including Sarbanes-Oxley, ISO 9000 or Investigational New Drug (IND) regulatory compliance.

There are four components of the solution:
• Control and Test Capability
• Exceptions Management
• Audit Facilitation Tools
• Change Tracking

These four components can be generalized for different types of compliance solutions.

The control and test capability includes a repository to catalog, organize and index all policies, procedures, and test plans. It centralizes the documentation for audit materials. The Testing Framework is part of this module. You can define how often to test and what operational controls need to be tested when. For example, companies may do full annual testing, and partial quarterly testing. The system sets up the testing spreadsheet, and records results into the test template. It supports working offline for parts of the test that are manual.

The exceptions management module initiates a remediation plan. Using business rules, the remediation can be assigned to one or more people. It also categories the severity of each anomaly, and monitors compliance rules for when different types of anomalies need to be remediated. For, material issues need to be remediated by end of following quarter. The application monitors every exception, and generates alerts as it approaches deadlines.

The audit facilitation tools module reports on who has access and permission to every module or system, which creates any financial report. The system automatically sends report to the system owner at defined intervals. It includes a snapshot of the system logs and attaches it to the re-approval process, so the business owner can see who is accessing the system. The system can also spawn exceptions (such as when someone who used to have access has moved on, but continues to have access), and can spawn a remediation plan.
The change tracking module tracks the process of system development and changes. It manages all the evidentiary documents for requirements documents and approvals, sign-offs source code reviews, and deployment and migration plans. It stores all the documents, and auditors can download them or they can be put on a CD for auditors to review them offline.

Most of the BPM vendors have focused on developing compliance solutions that implement and monitor specific processes, such as revenue recognition. This system is much more like a framework for implementing any type of compliance solution, by providing the essential services to ease the pain of compliance auditing.

For the past year, Pegasystems has focused exclusively on the BPM market, and providing solution templates for the finance, insurance and healthcare markets. This compliance solution is a horizontal framework that will work across industries and even different types of compliance solutions.

Posted by bethgb in Vendor Briefings | Permalink | Comments (0)

IBM has recently re-engineered the WebSphere Integration platform. If you had trouble understanding the platform before, you weren’t alone. There were multiple process engines, and putting them all one on slide and giving them one name didn’t help much.

But hey, IBM had the same legacy problems that many organizations face – they had a multitude of technologies that worked, but were not streamlined and optimized for the new types of applications they were being used for. Renaming and repackaging the products numerous times made them easier to sell, but not easier to use.

The good news is that the new WebSphere Business Integration Server is a re-engineered server. The even better news is that it is a single server – encompassing the functionality of both MQ Workflow and Interchange Server – that runs on top of WebSphere Application Server (WAS).

The 4.x version of WebSphere Business Integration Server included the Integration Broker, MQWorkflow and Interchange server as well as the WebSphere Business Integration tools, which included the Modeler that worked with MQWorkflow but not Interchange Server. WebSphere Business Integration Server Foundation v5.x was the app server based integration solution, which competed with BEA’s WebLogic integration.

WebSphere Process Server v6 greatly simplifies the stack. It essentially includes Workflow, Interchange Server and Server Foundation all on a single server. Because it is based on WAS, it gains all the services of WAS including increased scalability, integrated security and Web service enablement. In fact, the solution is now well positioned as an SOA platform, with Business Integration Server providing process management services.

While the majority of the brouhaha about this release has been about the ESB (blog entry to follow), the real excitement is in the new Process Server and what you can now do with the Monitoring and Modeling tools. The process server itself is based on BPEL. You can now convert Interchange Server collaborations into BPEL processes. Modeler and Monitor have also been converted to Eclipse tools. The new WebSphere Integration Developer now provides a common platform for creating integrated composite applications – more good SOA news. With the new single server, Modeler and Monitor now cover both human and automated workflow.

Monitor has many BAM capabilities. It supports Six Sigma and Balanced Scorecard and 30 graph types out of the box. Real-time analytics are offered through multi-dimensional DB2 Alphablox. Both metrics and KPIs can be defined. KPIs have upper and lower thresholds, and are displayed on dashboards or can trigger alerts. Metrics are different types of measures, such as cost and time, which can be used to define situations containing rules that trigger defined actions such as sending email or an alert to a dashboard or other device, launch an automated process or Web service. Dashboards are role based, run on WebSphere portal and provide customization capabilities of the portal. This release of Monitor only monitors Process Server events. However, it is based on the Common Event Infrastructure, and in a future release will be able to monitor events from other applications as well.

These changes remove many of the former obstacles IBM faced with its legacy of buying technologies to quickly fill its integration holes, but then needing to integrate the integration technology. Putting it all on WAS enables IBM to move forward with a much stronger SOA platform offering – one which is easier much easier for customers to understand and implement.

Posted by bethgb in Vendor Briefings | Permalink | Comments (0)