What does Business Process Improvement have to do with BI?
Not much, if you read Wikipedia. But I’m beginning to suspect that a large number of the Wikipedia articles that stand at the confluence between business and technology are written by management ‘experts’ who are practicing for their next book, based on their part-time management studies. Certainly most of those articles are arcane enough for those of us steeped in practical application of technology.
Yet there are other ways to bring about improvement in business processes than by following a rigorous methodology imposed from on high.
On the one hand, it’s often possible to just walk into a business and identify candidates for improvement, if not processes that are thoroughly broken. That’s not just because a fresh set of eyes can help, but because experience, and enough experiences in different workplaces, can help to quickly identify both the work practices that are worth repeating, and those that are well broken.
But that’s not what I’m talking about either.
It is this: a business’ data is a model of the business and its practices. In return, business intelligence is a process of accurately reflecting that business and its processes. And in endeavouring to do so, a good amount of business analysis is called for, to understand the business as you are reflecting it. And that wholistic engagement process has a habit of uncovering what is not working as expected in business processes, both in practice (when analysing what people are doing) and in virtualisation – because when the data is shown to be incorrect and/or not as expected, that mismatch tends to reflect business processes that are awry.
That is not necessarily a part of the brief of a business intelligence professional. Yet with forward-thinking management, it can be.
But at the very least, business intelligence professionals are ideally placed to gain insight into both a business and the model of the business and, in identifying mismatches, to foster improvements in business processes. It would be negligent to waste such opportunities.
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Cheers!!!
I fully agree with you.
There is a lot of linkages between the two.
Infact, when BI is supplemented by a full fledge EPM, the entire BPM is driven by BI and EPM in my opinion, especially the BPI part…
Atif,
I gather you’re distinguishing between Enterprise Process Management and Business Process Management.
I suspect both of those terms are subject to definitions nearly as numerous as there are practitioners. BPM (Business Process Management) can be taken as the analysis, management and improvement of business processes. EPM (Enterprise Process Management) is the alignment of the enterprise’s business processes and architecture with its strategy and resources.
To that extent, what you’re saying makes sense – although BPM is sometimes treated as equivalent to the above EPM definition.
I wouldn’t (yet) suggest that BI can be a key driver of process improvement, because the insights gained and the relevant business analysis can be too piecemeal.
But have a look at my second post after this: a report on Olivera Marjanovic’s integration of BI and BPM.
[…] BI with Business Process Management Coincidence: a scant twelve days after I discussed the contribution BI can make to process improvement, I found myself listening to Olivera Marjanovic […]
At margin comment, a BI specifically oriented solution to BPM and process improvements can be depicted and must be validated in scope to cover most of BPM Initiatives. In a simply way a BI collaborative platform can be a helpful when it is oriented to reach specific processess goals previously set. A consolidated BI platform with analytics applications can be a more robust solution supported with analytics flow or analytics workflow where linked BI Content (reports, analytics, dashboards), allow to identify not only current situation but tendencies and deviations from original business expectaions. As a summary a good combination of a Data Model for Decision Making and a Data Model for BPM Initiatives parameters and goals would be a good start to support any BI initiative towards process improvment.
Hi Luis,
I certainly agree with what you’re saying. On the whole, I would dichotomise ad hoc and systematic process improvement initiatives; you’re speaking to the latter, where BI acts as a necessary support for BPI/BPM initiatives. I like the idea of a data model aimed squarely at process improvement.
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