This was spurred by Jessica Ann Mola's question posted here on ebizq elsewhere on whether BI has mainstreamed and gotten into country's operations.
You may have noticed grocery store employees or employees at places like Wal-Mart walking around with little wireless handheld devices scanning this product's bar code or that one's over there! A lot of them are immediately affecting another remote company's operations instantly, placing orders or affecting the manufacturing line at a bread factory nearby!
Business Intelligence, especially with respect to business processes can have the most effect, positively, on companies' operations, agility, and ability to best the competition!
If New World Bank can process your Mortgage Loan Application in 15 days while an Old World Bank loses out because they can do it in only 45 days. This is where a lot of collection of data on exactly where the Old World Bank is wasting time on processing that can lead to making the 45 day lead time to 15 days.
Sales data and Financial Data have been warehoused, business-intelligenced, sliced and diced to perfection!
Process Intelligence, widely also known as real-time, operational intelligence, is the new Business Intelligence that will affect Operations in more profound ways than the current use of Business Intelligence in Sales and Financial aspects of a company's operation.
It is amazing that when certain technologies have been pronounced as mature by the IT press, like Business Intelligence or Data Warehousing, they are morphing, changing and evolving to suit ever new uses!
Evolution - The stream of tendency in which all things seek to fulfill the law of their being - Marcus Aurelius
The scenarios described in the posting are relevant, but do not go far enough to describe true "Process Intelligence". They demonstrate that business intelligence can be utilized within the context of a process, but provide little intelligence about the process itself. When I hear the term process intelligence, I am looking for information about process behavior that will enable me to assess, evaluate, and optimize a business process. Typical KPI's or even event anomalies do well to point out deficiencies that are the result of a process or a events as they occur within a process, but don't go far enough to reveal the underlying root cause - which is resident in the patterns of behavior that emerge as processes are executed over time.
Unfortunately, Root Causes don't automatically pop out of any process. They will have to be teased out and analyzed, over a long time to have any meaning. You can do analysis only with all kinds of measurement. Some are KPIs like Productivity, Effectiveness metrics. But they will have to be analyzed in conjunction with independent variables - application response time, experience of person performing the process, etc. There also, quantifying the cause and effect nature of how independent variables affect dependent variables have to be teased out only with measurements of various kinds and experiments. Let's say that productivity is falling - do you know if it is because system response times are slower or the people performing the process need more training?
However, the underlying foundation needs to be meausrement of dependent variables. No measurement, no progress on a longer term analysis of what the root causes are!