The business process management (BPM) blogosphere is buzzing with discussions on integration of BPM and business intelligence (BI) infrastructure. Some of the bloggers and analysts have even predicted consolidation of BPM and BI offerings into a single product. Business activity monitoring (BAM) is considered to be an integral part of modern BPM systems.
BAM makes BPM a complete process lifecycle management infrastructure by enabling user organizations to manage process life-cycle end-to-end in terms of "Define - Execute - Control - Monitor - Improve". In my opinion, BAM is nothing but process intelligence functionality that is a subset of BI, and hence I find this sudden surge in BI and BPM integration discussions, indeed, very surprising, as it always existed. BPM vendors have gone about addressing the BAM need of their users / customers in two ways:
- Creating BAM functionality within the BPM system
- Integrating their BPM system with a provider of BI system provider
The key question is how user organizations should enable the BPM implementations with BI capabilities. This largely depends on two factors:
- Whether the BPM system being implemented by the user organization has BAM capabilities, and
- Whether the user organization has implemented a BI system.
If user organizations already have or intend to implement a BI system, then they should leverage their BI implementations by integrating BPM with BI system.
I strongly feel that in time large software vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP will combine their infrastructure system offerings under one solution. Such infrastructure software will include BPM (workflow), business rules, content management, BI, portal, and integration functionality. However, these offerings will be available as separate components and user organizations will have options to pick and choose components depending on their need. So do expect acquisitions and consolidations across these software domains. Until then, IT managers and leaders will have a tough time making choices while selecting systems and vendors for implementations across these software domain areas.
