The new product is being developed under the code-name Teton, and will be branded as IBM Workplace for Business Strategy Execution. According to IBM officials it will serve up visual BI dashboard and scorecard views to business users to help companies better align corporate strategy with operational business objectives.
The software visually maps tasks in a business process to the larger strategic objectives of an organization. The collaborative capabilities of Workplace (which includes a set of integrated tools to facilitate knowledge sharing and exchange) also lets users visually map relationships with other users, external suppliers and even customers.
IBM says the product is not being positioned as a BI application per se, but as a desktop business productivity tool. Officials said the product surfaces data from data warehouses as visual BI-aware dashboards that are closely linked to the Workspace environment.
Officials add the software will support dashboards and portlets from third-party vendors as well. Integration with BPEL (business process execution language) and Excel-based metrics is also possible.
The move is really an attempt by IBM to dumb-down performance management, which shares a similar goal of linking strategy to operational execution. Of course performance management is simply more than just rolling out a set of dashboards; the hard work goes on at the back-end. But what’s interesting about IBM’s BI dashboarding solution is the real-time linking of collaboration and other context-sensitive tools to drive real-time responses and actions based on objectives directly from business user desktops without having to get IT involved.
IBM Workplace for Business Strategy execution is currently in beta and is slated for a general release sometime in October.
Workplace is also the focus of two other business productivity solutions aimed at sales force optimization and compliance/risk management that IBM has up its sleeve.
