IBM Advances Business Process Monitoring

A new approach to managing information flow that combines new metadata capabilities in IBM’s InfoSphere Business Information Monitor with monitoring software that IBM picked up when it acquired Guardium is being rolled out to a select group of customers as part of a technology preview. Guardium is one of 30 companies, including Initiate Systems today, that IBM has acquired in the information management and analytics software category since 2005.

In addition, IBM is rolling out an Optim Data Redaction offering that allows customers to literally black out any portion of a sensitive document in order to ensure that information in any document remains private.

Michael Curry, IBM Information Integration program director, said the overall process is akin to using agents to monitor networks. But rather then monitoring packets, the agents are now intelligent enough to identify anomalies in business processes. Once identified, the information associated with those business processes is flagged in a system that then alerts business users to the potential discrepancy.

IBM is trying help companies identify the “one truth” about any given business process at a time when there are multiple data sources that are often conflicting within any given enterprise or set of enterprises. The ultimate goal, said Curry, is to detect and remediate degradations in the quality of the information supply chain associated with any given business process.