Business Process Intelliegence is nothing new. Walk into any call center, they will be measuring Average Handle Time (AHT) of agents. I am sure Amazon measures the average size of an order in terms of weight and number of items and also the time it takes for a customer to get an order from the time they place the delivery till it is delivered.
These are all already being measured in bits and pieces, here and there, but they all form part of a bigger picture
where all business processes could be measured along all relevant metrics.
In fact, systematic understanding of business process metrics and how they interplay with each other provides a lot of answers to dilemmas and questions companies may face in their operations.
Business processes have Efficiency factors and Effectiveness factors. Sometimes they go along with each other well and sometimes, they may not. For example, many companies may want to provide absolutely the best customer service or support on the phone. Given this, they may need to staff their call center with the best personnel around and in very large numbers so that no one is kept waiting on the phone, at all. And the customer service person stays on the phone as long as the customer is satisfied fully. This however, we know, is not practical.
The Call Center manager is measured on efficiency also. They may need to staff the call center with the minimum number of people at exactly the right times of the day so that every agent is fully utilized and each call takes exactly the amount of time needed to do a good job and keep the customer satisfied!
Here we see the opposing nature of Efficiency Metrics like Average Handle Time and Effectiveness Metrics like Customer Satisfaction Index!
The same applies through the entire operations of a company, whether they are Strategic or Operational. It may be argued that Research, Advanced Develeopment and Prroduct Development are all divinely inspired events that happen out of the blue an are not subject to processes. Nothing could be more wrong! We all know that stories about Xerox's employees at their Xerox Parc and other research centers coming up with brilliant inventions and innovations only to see that they have been turned into products by some other company. The failure here is that the Research Processes worked very well but productization processes failed miserably or were non-existent They could just easily have kept track of how many research ideas were turned internally into products!!
The new Volkwagen Bug was done in secret in one of Audi's factories with the blessing of Volkswagen's CEO because he knew that the effort would fail because of politics in the regular Volkswagen business hierarchy! Here also there was a process, albeit an informal one.
Business Process Intelligence also helps small companies compete with larger companies and vice versa! In the above example of a company having to deal with competing metrics like Average Handle Time on the phone and Customer Satisfaction, if my company were a small company trying to take business away from biggies like Amazon.com, my strategy may be to relax my requirements on my Average Handle Time and maximize my Customer Satisfaction Index till I start taking market share away from Amazon.com. On the other hand if the large company faces large financial pressures, they may not be able to do the same thing easily.
Thus, it becomes one of adjusting your various Efficiency and Effectiveness factors based upon what your business strategy is, and tactics are at any point of time.
More than Sales Intelligence or Financial Intelligence, Business Process Intelligence provides you with objective
measurement of your various activities within the company. You can get a sense of how you are performing currently,where your bottlenecks are and what to address within the company process wise.
Action is the real measure of intelligence - Napoleon Hill
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