I am at the Gartner Event Processing Summit in Stamford, USA. At this event the international event processing community comes together to speak about the future trends of Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). BI gives you information on what happened yesterday in your organization. Based on this historical data you can predict what might happen in the future. BAM delivers insights on what is happening right now. The technology which is used for this real-time approach is event processing. With this technology, BAM complements BI systems. Both approaches have one goal – they need to improve the performance of the business processes.
What benefits do you expect from BAM? According to a survey from Gartner, 27% of the people interviewed said that they expect to lower process costs. 23% say they expect a faster execution of processes. 17% believe to gain a comprehensive view across multiple processes. These figures are not really surprising. Analyzing events just makes sense if you tie it to the business context.
This is why BI and BAM is an important topic for IDS Scheer, as well. We are able to map the events to the related business processes. ARIS Process Performance Manager (ARIS PPM) is our BI tool which aggregates and analyzes historical data. ARIS Process Event Monitor (ARIS PEM) analyzes real-time events and sends alerts if Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are not met. Of course you are able to find out which processes cause the problems and which processes will not work as planned. With this tool, the management is enabled to take real-time action based on the data which is available to them.
The question is - Which tactics help you link BI and BPM? Of course the software systems you use must be real-time enabled and capable to process events. The processes must be known/documented to have the focus on them. A presentation layer must be available which visualizes the results of the data mining. Most important: You need to have the right skills in the company. The BPM folks must be able to think BI and the BI people must be able to think process. Both approaches are made for each other but the people working in these areas have to make it real. Also, don’t underestimate the power of politics in organizations. Combining BPM with BI provides a new level of transparency. Not everybody is happy about this...
From September 17-19 I attend the 4th Event Processing Symposium. Thats the official meeting of the Event Processing Technical Society. IDS Scheer is a founding member of the society.
You can learn more about the integration of BPM, BI and BAM on the international Process Intelligence Roadshow by IDS Scheer: www.process-intelligence.com.
I am looking forward to seeing you there!
