Globalisation, outsourcing, worldwide overcapacity, intense competition, and the pace at which things change are concerns forcing executives to rethink their business processes, according to Marco Gerazounis, director of Middle East and Africa for Tibco.
Speaking at a recent BPM conference at Gallagher Estate, Gerazounis said executives need to ensure work is being done efficiently and their processes can change quickly in response to any future threats and opportunities.
The convergence of business process management (BPM) and business intelligence (BI) should make accomplishing these operational goals easier, he added.
Gerazounis explained that BPM is evolving to incorporate other key technologies, including real-time process monitoring, BI, and executive dashboards.
The combination of these complementary technologies will provide companies with a systematic approach to all aspects of business process redesign, management and performance monitoring, he said.
Early BI products used analytic techniques to search through large collections of data, provide visibility into that data and even look for patterns. Gerazounis put forward that the utility of these first-generation BI techniques was limited by two factors. The tools available required highly specialised analysts to understand the output, and first-generation BI products focused on the analysis of stale historical data.
A second generation of BI is moving towards addressing these shortcomings, said Gerazounis. New approaches placed an emphasis on gathering data from processes as they are executed.
Using information about the process from which the data is derived, the BI systems are capable of projecting what will happen during later steps in the process, if the current data continues to follow the trend in a given direction, said Gerazounis.
He added that the immediacy of the information and improved analytical techniques make the information more useful. Equally important is that second-generation BI relies on graphical interfaces that make it easy for the average business analyst or manager to use the products.
The bigger picture
Gerazounis said business process management software (BPMS) offers a process-level view of how the work is getting done, adding that this puts both the specific work of individual employees and the complexities of various software applications into a meaningful, malleable context.
He explained how BI fits into the picture: "As companies define processes and establish BPM systems to manage those processes, they are positioning themselves to apply analytic techniques at any point in a process. As each activity in a process is executed, information is captured.
"That information is stored and fed, via a BI system, to a management dashboard. The dashboards rely on a new generation of BI graphical techniques that make it easier for managers to understand and query the data.
"As companies see the need to have accurate and current business intelligence driving their business processes, they are demanding software solutions to help them achieve this. We fully expect to see a new round of acquisitions, as BPM software vendors begin to acquire BI vendors," says Gerazounis.
Companies need a better way to link BI and automated business processes in order to improve business performance, he said. Linking BI and BPM will result in reciprocal enhancement. BI will be improved because it is directly linked with the source of the business information, the BPMS, thus improving the ease and ability to access and analyse data.
The utility of BPMS is improved because information that was previously analysed offline is incorporated into BPMS. The processes it executes and companies that link these capabilities effectively will have a significant competitive edge, he concluded.
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