Master Data Management and BPM toolset - a strategic fitment?
Business rules are typically in an organization and these define the various process measures that organizations depend on for hardwiring various departmental activities. Business rules are typically imbibed in the way organization do business and the agility of an organization depends on the way an organization is able to configure, modify and manages these business rules. Retail Industry is predominant with business rules and it is ideal to externalize these rules into a central rule engine that can be configured once and consumed many times.
Business rules are core-features by which process engine work and it is this business rule set that separates one company from another. The strategic initiatives in most organization are to externalize these business rules into a centralized rule engine. Many business rules players such as Savvion, Pegasus, Lombardi and Aqualogic have externalized the business rules into a separate rule set that is seamless integrated with an MDM hub.
Recently I happened to read a blog by Dan Power and was then doing a head to head comparison of which best of breed MDM vendors have integrated the business rules with the BPM tooling. The list given below show case a couple of such integration with the major players still yet to jump onto the bandwagon:
- Siperian offers built-in integration with Lombardi Teamworks and Oracle/BEA AquaLogic BPM products.
- Initiate Systems has integrated with numerous BPM platforms to synthesize master data from externally orchestrated business processes and is developing integration with the BPM capabilities of Informatica PowerCenter based on joint customer use.
- D&B Purisma have taken a vendor-neutral approach to BPM and can integrate with the major best-of-breed BPM vendors. Purisma also has some workflow capabilities built into their data stewardship user interface.
- Cordys, a BPM specialist based in the Netherlands, provides some MDM capabilities as part of its business operations platform.
So essentially we are looking at a stage where the BPM tool majors such as Savvion, Pegasus and Lombardi collaborating with the MDM pure play vendors to provide a better value to market proposition. Surely such a move will instigate the major MDM players such as Oracle and IBM to quickly wire up a BPM integrated MDM hub. Collusion of complimentary technology and co-partnering with best of breed vendors would help more and more client organization to look at implementing an MDM solution that can help it to retain a strategic edge from its competitors as soon as the economy surges ahead.
