In eager anticipation of Wednesday's ebizQ "BI in Action" Virtual Conference, I wrote yesterday here about why BI needs BPM (and about why BPM needs BI at the "BPM in Action" blog). (Feel free to go and read or re-read either or both, after you register for Wednesday's event!) Today, in equally eager anticipation of a panel discussion to be featured at the Conference, I want to ruminate a bit on how best to achieve maximum business benefit by the combination of BI and BPM.
The panel discussion is "The Role of BI in BPM and SOA," and is being moderated by my ebizQ colleague and blogmate, ebizQ VP of strategic services, and SOA maven extraordinaire Beth Gold-Bernstein. And of course, one of the most obvious and popular answers to the question "how best to combine/leverage/take advantage of BI and BPM?" is some variant on the "with an SOA" theme.
However, despite all the wonderfully useful information promulgated about SOAs at ebizQ and elsewhere, there is no automatic connecting of the BI, BPM, and SOA dots, at least/especially not for most businesspeople. And in fact, how obvious do you want something called an "architecture" to be to users? When I'm in a building, I notice the architecture, but don't really care about how it was executed; I just want the building to remain standing, especially while I'm in it.
So I'm going to take a slightly different view. I offer the observation that SOAs (and related technologies, such as enterprise service buses, or ESBs) are critically important to technological integration of BI and BPM "on the back end." However, users, especially business-focused users, no more want nor need to see most elements of an SOA than they want or need to see explicit elements of BI or BPM solutions or architectures. What they want and need to see are the usable results of these behind-the-scenes elements and efforts.
So what's needed are dashboards and software-based services, including desktop widgets, that present to users information they can assimilate and act upon with minimal to no additional technical knowledge or help. These must be easily customized to meet the needs and expectations of multiple types of users, from senior executives to business and IT architects and strategists. They must be easily modified as needs and user types change. And they must be totally non-disruptive to business and IT operations. (That means desired or needed changes can be made without fork lifts or automatic weapons, and that all interfaces are driven by the same set of secure, up-to-date, and verified data.)
Achievement of these goals requires a fair amount of heavy lifting in that aforementioned behind-the-scenes area. Whatever BI and BPM solutions are chosen must be connected via seamless, flexible interfaces, to one another and to the presentation methods and tools of choice. And those presentation methods and tools must be easily combined, mixed, and matched. Depending on environmental particulars, this could mean integration with one or more types of application, portal, service, and/or Web browser software and/or service.
Fortunately, standards for such integrations, and tools supporting those standards – up to and including ESBs and SOAs – are beginning to improve, multiply, and take root effectively in many sizes and types of enterprises. And you can learn about many of these during the "BI in Action" Virtual Conference, and elsewhere across ebizQ. However, these solutions and standards are still evolving, as business needs and goals always are. This means that comprehensive and sufficiently fluid and flexible integration and presentation can still be challenging, even with an ESB and an SOA.
So, what's really needed to integrate BPM and BI most effectively is a combination of carefully crafted, deployed, and enforced business processes, supported by the best available business intelligence. In other words, a holistic, proactive approach to what I and others sometimes refer to as business knowledge management (BKM).
You might want to download and read a Research Note I wrote on BI, BPM, and BKM in preparation for the Virtual Conference, and keep some of this in mind during the panel discussion. And I'd be very interested in hearing about your own experiences with attempting to combine BI with BPM to better serve your business. But make sure to register for and attend Wednesday's event, before getting distracted writing to me…
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