Last week I ran across a very interesting and successful company, OpenConnect that seems to have some interesting technology that enables collection and analysis of Business Intelligence automatically - especially relating to Business Processes!
Claims Processing, especially in Healthcare is an inexact science and many BI efforts in this area have to do with following the right Business Process and measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of these processes.
The main problem with collecting some of this BI is the self-reporting nature of some of these processes.
OpenConnect seems to have come up with a better way to do the same thing but without any reporting of BI Metrics explicitly from any of the applications. They 'Infer" the conduct of the business process by sniffing accesses to applications, keystrokes, screen scrapes of mainframe applications, etc.
They reconstruct the way the business process was executed and compare it to the way it ought to be executed. This may mean measuring the time between actual occurrence of Event A compared to the actual occurrence of Event B and comparing it to the IDEAL time between Event A and Event B in an ideal conduct of the business process!
They call this Business Process Discovery!
Very interesting! This is especially useful in cases where processes are not properly documented and explicitly known ahead of time.
OpenConnect's abilities also includes the end users interactions on a website, for example.
They do it using a combination of different things like:
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Collectors - Collects KeyStrokes and Clicks
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User Activity Replay - Seeing exactly what users/customers saw and did across systems
- Converting Keystrokes into Business Events
- Combining Business Events into Process Intelligence - comparing actual times with ideal times.
- Dashboards, Reports on Business Process Intelligence so gathered!
Business Process Intelligence is still mainly at its infancy! BI is more mature since quite often it just deals with one monolithic group of data - Sales Data or Financial Data or Manufacturing Data. When you extend BI to business processes, that's when you start realizing the practical problems in collecting the data you need!
OpenConnect seems to have figured out some solutions and considering they have a number of really large clients using them successfully, they should be doing something right!
The so called unconscious inferences can be traced back to the all-preserving memory, which presents us with parallel experiences and hence already knows the consequences of an action. It is not anticipation of the effects; rather, it is the feeling: identical causes, identical effects . . . - Frederick Nietsche
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