James Taylor's Decision Management

I saw this align magazine online exclusive today - Blending Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Process Management (BPM): The Successful Path to Combining BI and BPM. While the general thrust, that BI and BPM have synergies and that opportunities for improvement can come from combining them, was fine I was somewhat disappointed. In particular the section of the article that discussed "BI embedded in the process". This section just discussed how to ensure that people being coordinated using BPM have access to the information they need. This implies, by omission, that system-to-system processes do not benefit from BI. If there is no-one there to read the reports, there is no way to use traditional "BI" to improve the process.

Yet clearly this cannot be so. We have lots of information about the process such as past results and much information about the players in the process (the customers, products, transactions etc). Surely this information could be used to provide intelligence about our business to the automated steps in our process? Well yes, it can. Just not with traditional BI tools. Instead of reports (from which people can draw conclusions), you must have models that draw those conclusions. Instead of interactive tools for people to explore, you must have models that navigate the various options and recommend. These kinds of models come from data mining and predictive analytics and let you drive decision-making in your automated processes from the data you have in your systems.

There is more on this topic on my other blog, including BI, BRMS, BPMS and don't forget Decisions..., Don't just collect that data, USE it, Turning Transactions into Decisions with EDM and a whole section on BI and another on BPM on this one. A basic introduction to predictive analytics can be found in some of the FAQ posts on the other blog too.

But I particularly like this one - Great article on Intelligent Business.

Technorati Tags: analytics, Business Intelligence, business process management, predictive analytics