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Will BPM and BI Converge?
By Jim Sinur | October 16, 2007
Just to get the discussion going, I would like to put forth an assumption for discussion around the growing importance of Business Intelligence (BI) to Business Process Management (BPM).
Recently there has been visible acquisition activity by power vendors acquiring major BI vendors (e.g.: Oracle acquiring Hyperion and SAP announcing its intentions to buy Business Objects). Some would say that the stack vendors are attempting to bolster their respective stacks for the looming stack wars. While each of these vendors is trying to mature their BPM offerings, they will still lag behind the independent vendors by at least 18 months. These vendors seem to have realized that BI will help them narrow the competitive gap, there are other forces and elements at work that must be considered.
As the discipline of BPM continues to drive organizations to reach process excellence, a legitimate business need to apply the benefits of BI becomes all the more obvious. For organizations to make informed business decisions, they must not only leverage and understand the real-time events and actions that BPM leverages and makes visible through Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), they must be able to capture and understand the historical, real-time, and predictive perspectives of their business in order to react to trends, issues, and opportunities in real time. Only then will organizations be able to truly manage and optimize their business processes and practices.
There is also a technological collaboration between BI and BPM that must be considered. While both share visualization and mining/aggregation techniques, BI focuses on data while BPM focuses on complex event processing. Of course there will be new algorithms around process intelligence and process discovery that has BI has not yet contemplated, yet many BI formulas continue to leverage events as well. Examples include correlation, predictive analysis, and clustering techniques.
The bottom line is that BI and BPM need each other. The real question is will they converge well enough within the stack vendor offerings to continue to compliment each other. I would submit to you that the stack vendors will provide a nice core that works in their environment, but will not cooperate well enough with other competing stacks, leaving the market with solutions that fall well short of needed integration, collaboration, variations and options.
Topics: BPM |
October 17th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
I think that we will see organizations looking for greater real time visibility. We know that the businesses face increasing Volumes of data with greater Variability and increasing velocity of execution. They will be making decisions in shorter cycle times and need to see the result of those decisions almost immediately. This means that reporting and data visualization systems must be up to the task. The marriage between BI and BPM is inevitable.
October 18th, 2007 at 3:45 am
It’s been a thought that’s been gestating with me for a while. The need for BI and/or MI has been around forever and the purpose has always been to give sufficient information to those in control to ake some sort of action. As with the dashboard of a car, the speedometer allows you to see what the current speed is, a speed limit sign comes by and the driver can take the appropriate aciton; the fuel guage runs low, a fueling station comes by and the driver can stop and refuel. Well, actually, these are “events” that could be automated (Ok, you wouldn’t want to really because of the safety factors in this rapidly-brekaing-down analogy!) but with BI/MI you could indeed take the complex events, apply “pattern recognition” and initiate further events that altered the behaviour of the system - without any human actually being involved! And why wouldn’t you?
October 18th, 2007 at 11:08 am
The convergence of BPM and BI would accelerate if there were a BPM logging standard. As it is now a BI tool must understand a BPMS’ event logging database. If the database were standardized in the same way that BPEL is used to drive BPMSs, a BI vendor could interoperate with any BPMS right out of the box. Customers would then have the choice of integrated solutions from a single vendor or a best of breed solution composed of multiple vendors.