As IT systems become more and more complex and as business operations become increasingly automated, there is a growing need from business managers to have better control on business operations and on how these are aligned with business goals.

This paper describes iBOM, a platform for business operation management developed by HP that allows users to i) analyze operations from a business perspective and manage them based on business goals; ii) define business metrics, perform intelligent analysis on them to understand causes of undesired metric values, and predict future values; iii) optimize operations to improve business metrics. A key aspect is that all this functionality is readily available almost at the click of the mouse.

The description of the work proceeds from some specific requirements to the solution developed to address them. We also show that the platform is indeed general, as demonstrated by subsequent deployment domains other than finance.