BI and BPM: coming together to maximise business benefit

Businesses today live with interesting constraints. We have mature legacy systems, powerful new technologies, and limited budgets. Organisations with mature IT practices now know that throwing technology blindly at a problem doesn't work, and neither does throwing human resources at it. The only way to improve efficiency and effectiveness is to improve business processes. Companies have more data than ever before, and want to reach out to more customers than ever before. The key to making sense of the data is BI, while the key to addressing more customers is the business process

Entering the third wave of BI

IDC has identified three distinct cycles in the BI market (see The next wave of business intelligence by Dan Vesset for more on these three cycles). The third wave of BI, which the market entered around a year ago, has a number of characteristics; the most important of which is the integration of BI with business processes to provide intelligent process automation (IPA). IDC's definition of this is that IPA software automates repeatable, operational decisions, within business process sets, in response to events where analytics drive the workflow.

Examples of this that exist in the market today are credit checking routines that run when the customer rings the call centre, and fraud detection routines that are integrated into an EPOS process. Both process concern frequently taken and automated decisions, both are driven by events which are contact with the customer, and both use complex analytics to drive the 'yes' or 'no' decision which is the key element of the workflow.

These examples both concern customer data, which is the primary application of this technology in financial services. (Other industries, such as manufacturing and retail, would look more closely at product data.) Customer data is usually used in processes where a high volume of operational decisions are taken, and a large amount of data is useful to work out the appropriate decision, by applying fraud patterns or customer segmentation profiles to the individual customers data. Another area where BI and BPM integration plays a key part is in regulatory compliance, which requires that both the process and the data on the process to be surfaced and auditable.

Bringing BI in from the cold

Traditional BI is often separate from the rest of the IT function both technically and organisationally. Technically it is different because it uses separate infrastructure, its own data stores and its own tools. Organisationally the differences manifest in the employment of separate staff, different management (often on the business side), and different corporate standards. This is fine for analysis and reporting needs for a restricted population, but wider deployment of BI via BPM software or applications requires a more integrated environment.

This introduces a number of challenges for BI and process integration. Results for operational decisions are usually required in real time, which means transactional applications are accessing a store of information that may usually have much higher latency than the application. Some level of precalculation can often be done, but in order to respond to events that happen for example during a phone call or an EPOS transaction requires some level of real-time calculation and integration with existing data.

A new market

BPM is one of a number of areas where BI is extended; others include the management of unstructured data as well as structured, master data management (MDM) which involves managing the full set of attributes for master data items like customers and products.

Currently the intersection between BI and BPM is at an early stage. Software vendors on both the BI and BPM sides are aware of the opportunity and looking to educate the market. The BI market has been hard fought for over a decade, with the entry of the database vendors, and for the third wave vendors in the BPM and infrastructure spaces are also entering the fray. End users will see a slew of exciting new software releases in the near future – but must remain focussed on the business problem they are looking to solve. On the BI side, Cognos is taking the lead, partnering with BPM vendors such as Lombardi and FileNet. Lombardi addresses the end-user-friendly side of BPM and integrates strongly with Microsoft Office, to surface processes in Outlook tasks and emails, as well as Word documents.

Alys Woodward works for IDC as its Program Manager, Business Intelligence and Analytics, EMEA.

About Bennu Group

Bennu Group provides leadership in global strategy, innovation and business performance through advanced management and process techniques delivered through training, consulting and software services. Bennu Group is paving the way for a new generation of agile, efficient and market-aligned businesses that redefine the term “success.”

www.bennugroup.net

About Terry Schurter

Terry is Bennu Group CEO and founder. Terry is an internationally recognized thought leader in Business Process Management, Customer Expectation Management and supporting technologies.

He has co-founded and served as an executive officer for multiple technology startups; has won international awards for Global Thought Leadership and Engineering Excellence; is the author of several patents and several books including his latest; Customer Expectation Management - Success without Exception.

Most recently, Terry served as CIO for the BPM Group where under his direction the organization achieved 400% growth in less than 3 years.

www.terryschurter.com

Customer Expectation Management – Success without Exception is available at:
http://www.amazon.com/Customer-Expectation-Management-Success-Exception/dp/092965207X