Marc-Thomas Schmidt

Web services and business process management

Web services based on the service-oriented architecture framework provide a suitable technical foundation for making business processes accessible within enterprises and across enterprises. But to appropriately support dynamic business processes and their management, more is needed, namely, the ability to prescribe how Web services are used to implement activities within a business process, how business processes are represented as Web services, and also which business partners perform what parts of the actual business process. In this paper, the relationship between Web services and the management of business processes is worked out and presented in a tutorial-like manner.

The evolution of workflow standards

Evolving standards enable workflow management systems to automate and coordinate work done by independently developed applications across enterprises and over the Internet. Modern workflow can interact with such technology as OOP, business object models, APIs, XML, and HTTP. The paper discusses the standards for workflow management produced by the Workflow Management Coalition.

Data for All: A Systems Approach to Accelerate the Path from Data to Insight

Zettabytes of data are available to be harvested for competitive business advantage, sound government policies, and new insights in a broad array of applications. Yet, most of this data is inaccessible for users, since current data analysis tools require an army of technical people to find, transform, analyze, and visualize data in order to make it consumable for decision making. In this paper, we present work in progress to lower the barriers for data-driven decision making by introducing a systems approach to scale the user experience, not only in the volume and variety of data, but also in the skills required to harvest that data. We call for a new approach for data-intensive applications that engages the user as an intelligent partner in a social and intelligent conversation with data by automating, guiding, and recommending data, transformations, visualizations, analytics, and suggesting collaboration opportunities within an analytics marketplace, and leverages both metadata and semantic information about the data captured from conversations.

WebSphere business integration: an architectural overview

Business integration is a set of capabilities that characterize service-oriented architectures for e-business solutions. These capabilities include the ability to integrate and manage business operation systems, enterprise information assets, business partners, and a collaborative network of decision makers to address specific business problems. WebSphere® Business Integration is an IBM software platform that embodies these capabilities to offer rapid time to value for delivering integrated e-business solutions. In this paper, we provide an overview of the WebSphere Business Integration platform-- the architecture, programming model, tools, and runtime.