The BPM acronym means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. If you’re into techno music, it’s all about beats per minute. If you’re a fan of Business Intelligence (BI), you know all about Business Performance Management. And if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you must have a strong interest for Business Process Management. Today, we will focus on the latter topic, and try to outline where it intersects with BI.
BI for going beyond Business Activity Monitoring
One of the first areas that people look at when trying to figure out how to make better use of their BPM and BI investments is Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). Your BPMS might generate a lot of events that are captured by your BAM infrastructure in order to monitor specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). That’s all fine and dandy, but what do you do with the massive amount of data afterward? Quite frankly, it would be a shame not to put it to good use, and this is where BI can help. Take this data feed from the BPMS, archive it into some kind of datamart, and use your BI tool of choice to slice and dice it every way you want. If you know what you’re looking for, this should give you some useful hint as to how you could improve your business processes at the first place.
BPM for feeding BI in a smarter way
If you adopt a process centric view of the world, data will look to you as nothing more than the audit trail of processes that have been executed. It’s actually not a bad way to look at things, especially if you’re trying to be smarter about the way you’re using BI for helping you make business decisions. One of the main challenges with any BI project is in finding the right information, and getting it aggregated in the right fashion. Usually, the data you need to make your decisions is scattered across many different systems, and simply getting access to it can be difficult. Using a BPM system to automate some processes and collect valuable information along the way can be one of the easiest ways of getting the right data all in one place. And because business processes tend to provide a fairly high level of abstraction—as opposed to data schemas or web services—the data they collect tends to be easier to consume for decision making purposes.
BPM for automating ETL
Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) is one of the most complex and expensive aspects of BI, but one you cannot live without. As mentioned before, the data you need is rarely available all in one place, and usually not in the right format. Getting it to fit into your datamart or datawarehouse is the job of ETL tools, but these tend to work best when extracting data from one place, applying any number of transformations to it, then loading it into your BI repository. Unfortunately, this kind of straight-through processing does not always work, and sometimes you will need to look up multiple systems for getting the data you need, or call for human intervention when automated rules for data cleansing are not enough. This is where a BPMS with a good collection of connectors to legacy systems, and the ability to process a large number of transient process instances in memory, can be helpful.
BPM for handling actions following BI-driven decisions
Once the slicing and dicing has been done, and the decisions made, it’s time for action. But in a corporate environment, action usually requires the participation of multiple contributors, and this is where a good workflow tool can be put to use. But because some of the tasks that are to be completed might require integration with different systems, using a complete BPMS for handling the downstream process that follows BI-driven decisions would make a lot of sense. This type of application has generated quite a bit of interest in the industry, but it will require a lot on the part of BI vendors, for they will need to get into transaction processing, an area they have traditionally shied away.
As we have seen, there are many scenarios where BPM and BI complement each others nicely. Recently, many traditional BI vendors have expressed strong interest for BPM technologies, and some have pulled the trigger with various levels of partnerships with BPM vendors. It will be interesting to see what comes out of that, and which BPM vendor goes out first in embedding a complete BI solution into its own product offering.
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