BPM, BI and decisioning - James Taylor's Decision Management

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February 05, 2007
BPM, BI and decisioning

Ismael posted this week on Where BPM and BI intersect. It's a nice post with some good points on which I wanted to expand. Firstly Ismael mentions BI as a way to understand your Business Activity Monitoring environment better. I have posted elsewhere about decisioning and BAM but I do think that analytics, as against reporting and analysis, can add real value to BAM if applied correctly. As Ismael says

"If you know what you’re looking for, this should give you some useful hint as to how you could improve your business processes at the first place"

Some of these improvements will be the kind that must be made manually to the process design. Some are more about realizing that certain data should drive you down certain parts of your process, and that's really about decisioning.

"data will look to you as nothing more than the audit trail of processes that have been executed"
"the data they collect tends to be easier to consume for decision making purposes"

Again, I agree, but companies must think about using their data not just collecting it. When they do I believe they will find that decision technologies can be a platform for analytics in BPM. Finally I want to add some commentary to this comment:

"using a complete BPMS for handling the downstream process that follows BI-driven decisions would make a lot of sense"

This is, of course, true. But how will you develop "BI-driven decisions" in the first place? Well you could build decision services that embedded rules and analytics (this is one of the 7 ways to use decision technologies). This might result in something that looks very like a transaction-centric process.

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