Automating Your Business

 View Only

Best of 2020: New DBA Product Releases

By DAVID Jenness posted Wed January 06, 2021 10:00 AM

  

Say what you will about 2020, but a serious amount of software development work got accomplished by IBM Development labs and many new Digital Business Automation offerings were announced and demonstrated.  The DBA portfolio has both a platform development strategy, for capabilities that can be leveraged across the platform, as well as many different point products that require enhancements and integration.

Here’s my favorite Top Ten New Releases from the Digital Business Automation team in 2020:

1. IBM announced in July the acquisition of WDG Automation, a Brazilian Robotic Process Automation vendor. Many of our Partners and clients with RPA experience have given it rave reviews for its capabilities. In this demo, recorded for the DBA Summit in November, you’ll see How to build a chatbot using WDG.

2. In addition to the new acquisition, near the end of 2020, IBM announced a new partnership with Process Mining vendor MyInvenio, for Cloud Pak for Automation customers to be able to accurately measure and reveal existing bottlenecks and potential areas for automation with associated cost-savings. Also created for the DBA Summit, here’s a quick look at how Process Mining works.

3. The major IBM Content Services announcement of the second half of 2020 is Automation Document Processing, a cloud-based, AI powered document processing solution that automates classification and extracts data and yet is easy for a business analyst to set up. Here is a sample of what it looks like for a user to set up new documents in an excerpt from the DBA Summit in November.

4. One of the great benefits of the Cloud Pak for Automation platform strategy is data can be gathered across all elements of the platform and AI applied to determine where to make improvements and where to shift resources, if needed.  Business Automation Insights delivers the AI and in June, we saw the new dashboards for BAI and a thing of beauty they are. 

5. When you combine rule-based Decisions in Operational Decision Manager with Machine Learning, the synergies between the two enable an organization to supercharge their decision models. This demonstration from the DBA Summit shows you a great example.

6. At the end of the first quarter, IBM released Automation Mobile Capture, a huge step forward for document capture on a mobile device, built from the ground up to make self-service capture easier than ever. This demonstration from an IBM-AIIM Event in June shows what you can do.

7. With the continual growth of video as business content – fed by security cameras, drone footage, police bodycams, video conferencing, video training and many other business uses – organizations need a way to classify, index, store and search video just as they do documents. IBM’s new Enterprise Video Streaming service puts these capabilities into IBM Content Services (FileNet).  Have a look here.

8. One of the great benefits of the Cloud Pak for Automation platform strategy is data can be gathered across all elements of the platform and AI applied to determine where to make improvements and where to shift resources, if needed.  Business Automation Insights delivers the AI and in June, we saw the new dashboards for BAI and a thing of beauty they are.

9. Salesforce has become the dominant customer relationship management platform in the world, and yet its ability to manage content is rudimentary at best and doesn’t meet the needs of the world’s highly regulated industries. Previously, content administrators would have to devise a two-pronged content management strategy, but the new Salesforce integration, announced in the spring, puts FileNet “under the hood,” handling content retention, security and compliance, and yet it’s invisible to most Salesforce users.  See it working here.

10. In the Age of Information, being able to protect that information has become a prime concern. HIPAA, GDPR and a wave of new laws around the world are heightening the stakes for organizations and creating new demand for capabilities like Document Redaction. This is the right capability for our times. Have a look.

This is not a complete list, but represents just some of the amazing work turned out by the DBA team in 2020. Plans for 2021 are even more ambitious. I can hardly wait.


#CloudPakforBusinessAutomation
#ContentServicesandCapture
#DecisionAutomation
#Featured-area-2
#Featured-area-2-home
#TaskAutomation(RPA)
#WorkflowAutomation
2 comments
1172 views

Permalink

Comments

Thu April 01, 2021 01:38 PM

Alfonso, I have noticed this to be true over my 11 years at IBM. For example, you could use BPM or Case Manager for similar use cases and there were two different teams selling both. It is probably inevitable, given IBM's many Development teams as well as IBM's acquisition history. Eventually though, IBM figures it out and merges them together. Have you tried both?

Thu April 01, 2021 12:51 PM

From my perspective, there is an unnecessary competition on the method and tool to create chatbots; One through Watson Assistant and the other through WDG Automation. I have used Watson Assistant in conjunction with Watson Discovery, Speech to Text, and Text to Speech and Language Translation in creating chatbots, and it seems to me to be a powerful combination of products capable of creating truly effective chatbots.