IBM Industry Models: Experience, Management and Challenges

Abstract

IBM’s Industry Models for Banking and Insurance continue to evolve to encompass our accumulated experience with our customers, the changing needs of the industry, and the changing directions in technologies. With over 15 years of use, these models represent a wealth of information about the information models, process models and integration models for these industries. The models are in use today by more than 300 leading Banks and Insurance companies, where they serve in a variety of capacities – from supporting Data Consolidation initiatives and Business Process Re-Design to addressing Risk & Compliance issues such as Anti-Money Laundering, Sarbanes-Oxley, or Basel II.

As successful as these models have been, technical challenges remain. Such challenges include:

1. the extension of the models to formally incorporate (and relate) additional dimensions (ontologies, states, KPIs, rules, etc)

2. how to establish both inter-model relationships as well as traceability (and per-haps round-tripping) from models to runtime

3. how to better identify and reuse common model snippets across domains

4. how to facilitate better understanding of complex models

5. automating the deployment of run-time artifacts based on models

While the IBM Industry Models represent a significant body of content, the management of this content and more broadly the management of metadata are also key concerns. In this talk, we will review the IBM Industry Models, discuss how this work is evolving, the metadata management roadmap and discuss some of these key ongoing technical challenges to be addressed by both research and development communities.