Business Intelligence tools have always evolved as a sort of a Rear-View Mirror, Post-Mortem Analysis set of tools.
How much of widget X did we sell in Region Z, Zone B by Saleperson G?
How did we perform on Accounts Receivables from Customer X, Period Y?
How much did we spend on Tea and Coffee in each of our offices?
These were are all Sales Intelligence Tools and Data warehouses or Financial Intelligence Tools or Data warehouses. Well understood paradigms, tools and evolved set of capabilities.
However, Business Processes and Operational Intelligence tools are very much lacking, not in conceptualization or technical capabilities.
It is in conceptualizing what is needed in Business Intelligence solutions in order to be able to do a good job at Process Improvement and what kinds of information do you need to be collecting in Business Intelligence tools and Data Warehousing solutions so that they can be useful for Process Improvement!
The whole idea of collecting Sales Intelligence is to gain insights into the products or services you are selling, who you are selling to and who is interested in buying, sales performance of your sales force and others.
The idea of Financial Intelligence is to gain insights into where you are getting your revenues from, how you are managing your cash, collections and disbursements, where you are spending your money, and others.
When it comes to Process or Operational Intelligence, the problem becomes slightly different. Post mortem, rear view mirror kind of information is not very useful. Knowing that you screwed up a patient's surgery experience or the Automobile Insurance Claim, after the fact is not as useful as getting real-time information as and when it is happening and you have a chance to set things right.
The other is also that business processes are hardly confined to any one corporation or enterprise any more. The entire supply chain from Order to Manufacture to Shipping to Cash to PostSales Support are all handled by more than one organization, many of them outsourced to third parties.
The customer experience now is in the hands of many different parties but as far as the customer is concerned they are dealing with XYZ Insurance or Dell Computers when they buy a PC and expect it to be shipped to them as promised. Any delays in the chain by any party affects the main business that the customer thinks he/she is dealing with.
You need to have a clear idea of how the process is flowing. Something like a Visio flow diagram that clearly shows handoffs, expected turnaround times from each of the parties involved in the chain. In addition, the Business Intelligence solutions need to capture and report on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are crucial for the execution of business processes in slice and dice report formats like Sales and Financial Intelligence solutions provide.
So you need to capture Business Process Flow as well as have the traditional Data Warehousing and analysis capabilities that exist currently.
Thus we see that traditional Business Intelligence solutions have a ways to go before hey address effectively, BI applications in the area of Process Improvement!
Something to think about!
There exist limitless opportunities in every industry. Where there is an open mind, there will always be a frontier! - Charles F. Kettering
Kannan,
Fully agree with you. Infact these are to be covered in the definition of value chain models. It should be possible to such intelligence information in these models.