It’s no surprise that Business Intelligence is top of the list again for CIOs. More visibility into operations, more real-time information, more knowledgeable employees…these are all critical to success. But leading organizations should not stop there. As business operations become increasingly more complex in the global environment, enterprises require enhanced business intelligence at the deepest level - embedded within essential business processes. How is this accomplished? By combining business intelligence with process or workflow design tools, you can create and implement “smarter” business processes that not only monitor and display information, but anticipate the need for decision making and supply just the right information to support those decisions during real-time operations. This is known as process-driven Business Intelligence (BI).

If you analyze a typical business process you will find that, fundamentally, business interaction is about events that occur and how businesses respond to such events: A customer calls with an inquiry. A shipment is received. An order is placed. These are but a few of the thousands of events occurring everyday within a typical enterprise. How well these events are handled is a true measure of business efficiency and customer satisfaction.

For example, how intelligently a business responds to the arrival of a shipment depends on many factors. Is the shipment on time, early, or late? Is the quantity correct? Does the shipment require special handling or packaging? Who should be notified about the shipment? Should payment be authorized or adjusted because something was missing from the order? In this simplistic example, an “event” called “shipment arrival” can trigger different responses that involve intelligent decision making based on a variety of conditions.

With process-driven BI, decision making is a fundamental aspect of any operational business process. As such, decision-making capabilities and analytics are embedded into the design of a process, not added after-the-fact or in reaction to processes that do not work efficiently. With this type of intelligent process design, the need for decision making is anticipated as an integral part of each process, resulting in business processes that work smarter, not harder in improving business efficiency and performance.

What Makes a Business Process “Smart”?

Typically, a business process consists of one or more events. An event is a message that indicates that a real-world business event has occurred. Events may be high-level, without application dependencies, such as "request customer billing address"; or they may be low-level and application specific, such as "update billing address in SAP". They may be fire-and-forget notifications that a business event has occurred. Or, many events may be requests for which responses are expected.