Intelligent Enterprise

Better Insight for Business Decisions

RSS
Webcasts
Whitepapers
Subscribe
Home

December 5, 2002

Business Process Intelligence

BI and business process management technologies are converging to create value beyond the sum of their parts

by Mark Smith

Continued from Page 1

3. To align your business processes, you should be able to drive individual actions based on a set of performance targets that compare to internal and external benchmarks. There's also a requirement to support process monitoring that can automate notification to individuals based on detection of thresholds or events that require action. This alerting can also evolve to support decision workflows where agents can intelligently move acceptance and approvals along a process, delivered through dashboards or scorecards that provide personalized and contextual views of process performance. This step could support, through monitoring, the business' ability to notify customers about order bottlenecks so they can take alternative actions — thereby helping the company reach defined performance targets.

This approach materializes into a process model-driven architecture that supports functional requirements and specifies interfaces for business-level functionality across all classes of users. (See Figure 2.) The next challenge, of course, is to integrate that process model with a performance management network. As you'll read in the next section, help is slowly becoming available from a specific sector of the enterprise software market.

Market Evolution

As I mentioned earlier, the entire enterprise software market — from enterprise applications, to BI, to application servers and enterprise application integration (EAI) technology — is shifting to more effectively support business processes. Significant gaps remain, but most vendors are adapting to support these requirements and move toward process-level performance management.

Contrary to the widespread belief that enterprise applications help manage business processes, the reality is that this software merely supports functional tasks; it was only recently that we saw vendors such as Oracle, PeopleSoft Inc., and SAP AG bring new process and integration support into their product portfolios. This fact complicates the situation for organizations that have bifurcated their application investments and ended up with disparate, heterogeneous sets of applications. This state of affairs requires a choice to be made between replacing operational systems or, more likely, using EAI middleware for process integration.

The application server and EAI providers are now seeing the value of BPM, a concept that Vitria Technology Inc. brought to the market at its inception, but now with a management tool — Business Cockpit. This trend will force middleware vendors, such as SeeBeyond, Tibco Software Inc., and WebMethods Inc., to evolve or become extinct as they strive to align their technology offerings in the midst of this market convergence. Although these companies are hyping their technology for its business potential, the fact is that organizations have already acquired enough integration technology: The challenge is how to utilize it for business priorities, which isn't the core competency of these suppliers.

The BI and analytic applications vendors that claim to offer the ability to optimize business processes are even farther from this goal, however: Their strengths in reporting and analysis have yet to be aligned in a process context. Although vendors such as Cognos Inc., Hyperion Solutions Corp., Informatica Corp., and Oracle have added workflow support to enable event and notification-based support, they have remained on the sidelines, focusing merely on adding process metrics to their product architectures for traditional reporting and analysis.

In 2001, Gartner Group coined the term business activity monitoring (BAM), which can be applied to any business area or processes requiring monitoring and alerting. Since then, a rising level of hype has spawned new vendors and product offerings focused on BAM, in addition to driving IBM to acquire Holosofx and Tibco to acquire Praja to complement their infrastructures and provide end-user functionality. However, the reality is that BAM addresses only one small piece of the overall performance management challenges, providing a view of historical performance through monitoring business processes. Many vendors are treading into unknown territories without fully thinking through customer requirements.

The BAM market can play a complementary or independent role in BPM, which has begun to evolve beyond just automating operations to provide enhanced capabilities for measuring and monitoring processes. This trend is evident in vendors such as Lombardi Software and Savvion, and even Vitria has extended its capabilities through partnerships with Crystal Decisions and IDS Scheer to create best-of-breed reporting and process analysis functionality through partnerships. The convergence of BPM and BAM is providing impetus for a wave of vendors (Actimize Ltd., Agentis Software, Categoric, Elity Systems Inc., Popkin Software, Procession Software Ltd., and SeeRun Corp.) to enter this area.

No Waiting

There are new barriers to how organizations manage business processes and look to reduce operational costs while improving revenue and service levels. By applying performance management to business processes and addressing these challenges, you can reduce process cycle-time — empowering employees to be responsive to business events and make better, faster, and smarter decisions.

Rate This Article

Comments:

Optional e-mail address:

Existing investments in enterprise software have created integration and process challenges, but they are finally being addressed. Consequently, you'll now need to focus tightly on technology investments that can provide real value for achieving performance management in business processes. Previous investments haven't always paid off, and the continuous cycles of upgrades must be kept in check to ensure that you can leverage your investments and move to strategic IT projects, such as BPI, that can add value to the business.

A business process model should be the centerpiece of this new strategy as a means to integrate the right technologies to address your performance and process management requirements. Don't wait on promises — look to solutions that can provide this capability today, and don't get sandbagged by projects that won't add value in a six-month window. Enabling BPI is your first step toward fulfilling the possibilities of performance management and building a network that can link strategic, tactical, and operational decisions by empowering users with the right information and the right metrics.

Mark Smith [mark.smith@ventanaresearch.com] is the CEO and senior vice president of research at Ventana Research, an advisory services and research firm providing insight and education on best practices and technology in performance management.