More on the team

"We're bridging the gap between business and IT."

Jun Zhu joined IBM Research because he wanted to help clients rather than be a pure IT engineer. His focus on business process modeling and integration has lead to the development of a Business Process Integration and Management platform (with methods, tools and runtime environment) that brings high powered results to small and medium businesses.

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) have many of the same problems with integration as large enterprises, but with fewer resources to address the issue. SMBs need an infrastructure that is efficient, robust and lightweight so that solutions can be easily developed and implemented.

Jun Zhu has helped make this dream reality by embedding model-driven technologies and some heavy-duty analytics into a well designed framework, tool and runtime environment that can be easily used by both business and IT user alike. By using models to represent business/IT issues it was possible to apply formal analytical methods to gain important insights into process correctness and effectiveness. Modeling also made it easier to transform the modeled processes into IT objects that can be used to design, develop and implement applications.

To put it in simple terms, these tools mean that a person can intuitively model a process, combine it with others and look at possible flaws or conflicts in the business logic of the joint process. The result is then automatically transformed into a structure that IT can begin designing and developing. As work continues, both business and IT team members can revise and update their view of the project and the information will be shared.

The final solution was christened the WBI Service Utility. Proof of its value in helping the integration process for small and medium businesses came when Jun Zhu had the opportunity to use the WBI Service Utility with a Asian bank that has operations in different countries/regions. Reconciling laws, IT systems and local functions for eight key processes was completed in record time, in spite of the SARS outbreak, as a result of the efficacy of the WBI Service Utility in translating business needs to IT reality.

Best of all, Jun Zhu has been able to take what was learned from the banking engagement and further improve the WBI Service Utility. In doing so, he has created an opportunity to bring real value to SMB clients looking to lower the cost and risk of integration. When Jun Zhu isn't improving the gap between business and IT, he enjoys playing video games, watching movies, listening to music and traveling.