What is process intelligence without rules?

The folks at the Business Rules Forum have been doing a series of preview webinars to showcase the content of the show this fall. This week they had Jim Sinur, now Chief Strategy Officer of Global360 and previously the Gartner analyst most associated with business rules and BPM. Jim's topic was "What is process intelligence without rules". You can access the recording from the webinar page (free registration required). This page also gives you access to one I did with Neil Raden on "What Are Smart (Enough) Systems and Why Do You Need Them?" (a short overview of some of the material in our new book). Anyway, Jim had an interesting take on business process and rules and how they work together.

Essentially he argues that "process intelligence" does not become active until you apply rules to make decisions based on that intelligence. Organizations all have some kind of performance goals. Process intelligence, he says, is about what is really happening in your processes so you can see how it matches to these goals. If you are to optimize your business then you need better decision making and better processes - decision management AND process management as I have argued before. Process intelligence is complex, however, because there is a lot of complexity and process dispersion across different environments, enterprise applications, legacy applications, BPM etc. Process Intelligence requires lots of monitoring points and support for both modeling a process and monitoring one even if it cannot be modeled. This gives you the end-to-end visibility you need but it is critical that you don't sacrifice one aspect for another. Complete visibility is the order of the day and this is a prerequisite in his mind for superior alignment and agility as well as improved efficiency and effectiveness. He (and Global360) argue that Process Intelligence can lower costs by increasing visibility and suggesting improvements, lower risk through alignment and improve asset leverage.

Jim went on to discuss process optimization (or more generally business optimization) and outlined 5 levels - manual processes, repeatable processes, managed processes, adaptive and finally optimized processes. Continuous improvement is the key and this requires a loop from applications being integrated, processes modeled and managed, performance goals defined, results visualized, decisions and processes aligned and then finally the opportunity to optimize. While Jim was focused on processes and process intelligence, he made the point that business rules management is a critical component of both policy management and for managing actions to take as a consequence. Policy and rules governance come first is his mind but you also need decisions to go from alerts or event to an action. You are trying to minimize the delay from an event to an action or business response, after all. The action you need may or not be taken by a managed process so decision management needs to cut across BPM and other systems. Decisions, in this approach, matter for figuring out what conditions need a response and for allowing you to automate best practices in processes. Jim also talked briefly about the need for rules to be externally visible and for the use of scenario management with rules to have "on the shelf" alternatives for changing circumstances.

Jim had a pretty process-centric point of view in this webinar but I think he would agree that using rules (and analytics) for decisions is not the same as using rules as part of a BPM environment. I have blogged before on this topic like this post on IDC's view of BPM in the future and this one on intelligent processes. I also wrote a longer piece on my other blog - Business Rules, Business Decisions, Intelligent Processes, Enterprise Decision Management where I discussed both Jim's view of processes and rules while he was still at Gartner and IDC's Steve Hendrick's work on Intelligent Process Automation.

For those of you who find this interesting, you should seriously consider signing up for the business rules forum - it is going to be a great show this year.

Technorati Tags: BPM, business process, business rules, decision management, Jim Sinur, Neil Raden, process intelligence, Smart (Enough) Systems, smartenoughsystems, intelligent process automation