Analytic Apps Meet BPMThe result is not compromise, but enrichmentContinued from Page 1 This and other advances in best practices have enabled vendors, IT, and consultants to more accurately anticipate user requirements for the content of business-function-specific data marts. As a result, the data marts under many commercially available analytic apps are now far more relevant out of the box to more corporations, which in turn reduces the amount of customization required to tailor an analytic app to a user's business. User ViewpointThe rise of performance-oriented analytic apps has forced a number of changes visible in the user interface (UI):
Know SoonerA few business users need metrics-oriented alerts based on up-to-the-moment data, instead of data refreshed nightly (which is the norm). Addressing this cutting-edge need, Informatica's new PowerCenterRT is an ETL tool that monitors data continuously to enable real-time alerts in Informatica Applications. Likewise, ActaWorks provides real-time data monitoring for BusinessObjects Analytics. BPM and BI SynergyYou can see that automating BPM with BI software strongly influences data marts, ETL, UI features, domain expertise, and the overall approach of an analytic app. This broad and deep influence constitutes a trend, in fact the strongest one seen in vendor offerings in recent years. But the trend is broader than vendor offerings. Let's ignore software for a moment, and look back at the 1990s. BPM advanced steadily throughout the '90s to become a preferred method for managing businesses. As the economy cooled starting in late 2000 — and rampant spending and hunch-playing fell from favor — many corporations returned to running the business by the numbers, with a focus on knowing where to contain costs and in which well-performing parts of the business to invest dwindling resources. Hence, BPM, as a management methodology, is even more relevant today than in the '90s, so we should expect to see more software products automating it. Obviously, the analytic, business modeling, and information-delivery capabilities of BI technologies are a good fit for BPM automation. What's not so obvious is that the synergy between BI and BPM has led to improvements in both. Analytic apps — which previously were mostly buckets of reports, lacking structure or direction — achieve greater usability and relevance when BPM methods guide their construction. And BPM's tedious and time-consuming tasks of data gathering and metrics calculation become quick and facile, leaving time for greater insight, when automated via an analytic app and its BI platform. With this synergy afoot, it's no wonder BPM-oriented enhancements constitute the leading trend among vendor offerings for analytic apps and the BI platforms that support them. Philip Russom, Ph.D. [www.PhilipRussom.com] is a Giga Research Director at Forrester Research Inc., where he provides advice to user organizations about business intelligence, data warehousing, and data integration. RESOURCESActuate: www.actuate.com Related Articles at IntelligentEnterprise.com:
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