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BI and business process management technologies are converging to create value beyond the sum of their parts
The business environment today demands that your organization redouble its efforts to improve the efficiency of processes that have a positive impact on financial performance. Fortunately, the capability to be much more responsive to business events is now available, enabling you to eliminate bottlenecks in the decisionmaking process.
For example, the ability to continuously measure and monitor a business process is now economically and technically possible through years of technological advancements in application integration and servers, business rules and workflow, business intelligence (BI), and process management software. Specifically, the developing convergence of BI and business process management (BPM) software is enabling business process intelligence (BPI): the application of BI-oriented performance-driven management to business processes. Instead of simply automating business processes - as they've done for years - forward-thinking organizations are beginning to realize that gaining intelligence about such processes will guide business and IT investments that can result in reduced costs and higher ROI.
Consider the example of a computer technology retailer looking to drive more efficiency in its customer order-to-fulfillment processes to align revenue and service level goals. Recent analysis suggests that fulfillment targets are down by 10 percent, customer satisfaction is down by 15 percent, and out-of-stocked items are up 15 percent, which is probably contributing to a 5 percent revenue decline. The retailer has no systematic method of examining these processes to link and monitor activities among order, finance, inventory, warehouse, and distribution functions. To effectively respond to bottlenecks through notifications that can drive action and inform customers about order delays, the retailer has to find a way to drive more efficiency through measuring and monitoring activities.
FUSING PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT INTO PROCESSES
There's a lot of noise in the marketplace about corporate, business, and enterprise performance management. Regardless of the term used, the ability to apply performance management principles to daily operations - to optimize overall efficiency, continuously improve quality, and assign value to tangible and intangible assets is now the ultimate goal of most large business organizations. The question is, how can your organization transform its existing, transactionoriented information architecture into a performance management network? (See Figure 1, page 28.)
The most...