As organizations seek greater growth and the ability to adapt more quickly to change, there is an increasing need for insight into the impact business processes have in terms of business performance and the ability to achieve organizational goals.

Recently, there has been a significant growth in demand for pervasive business intelligence (BI) to gain better visibility into business process performance and improve decision making at all levels of an organization. According to IDC, the worldwide business analytics software market reached $19.3 billion in 2006 and is expected to grow at a healthy compound annual growth rate of 10.3 percent over the next five years.

At the same time, organizations are also looking to Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) to leverage their existing IT application assets to adapt more quickly to change and seek greater growth. The simultaneous growth of investment in BI and SOA technologies is no coincidence. Today, SOA and BI have emerged as top strategic focus areas for CIOs. While both are able to bring considerable benefits to the organization when deployed separately, there are significant synergies which can be attained by integrating BI within a SOA. In fact, a recent Forrester Research report discusses how the intertwining of technologies like SOA, BI and BPM are the foundation for a new application platform and companies that “deeply integrate SOA and the “B3” categories (BI, BPM, and business rules) in their products save user organizations from having to do the integration themselves.”

Today, organizations looking to take advantage of the synergies of integrating business intelligence within a SOA and extend the value of those investments are focusing on the following areas:

Understanding Business Process Performance