The TIBCO Blog

An email from Layna Fischer, who is editor of the annual WfMC‘s “BPM and Workflow Handbook”, tells us that the theme for the 2010 handbook is a “Spotlight on Process-Driven Business Intelligence (BI)”. To wit:

In 2010 we include a special spotlight on “Process-Driven BI” to illustrate how Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Intelligence (BI) are increasingly intertwined. Linking business intelligence and business process management creates stronger operational business intelligence.

Users seek more intelligent business process capabilities in order to remain competitive within their fields and industries. BPM vendors realize they need to improve their business processes, rules and event management offerings with greater intelligence or analytics capabilities.

We welcome submissions that include issues, case studies, guidance, solutions or research such as:

* BPM integration with collaboration, portals and BI
* BPM-BI with application assembly and deployment
* Dynamic event-based BI driven by BPM
* Embedding BI applications into business processes

Taking the 4 points above:

1. BPM integration with BI – this is quite an easy one as reporting (BI) on the process statistics gives insight into the long term performance of your processes – and thence areas for improvement. An obvious TIBCO example is TIBCO iProcess Spotfire – although this is more analytics than simple paper reporting…
2. BPM-BI with application assembly and deployment – I have to confess I have no idea what this phrase means! Is this BPM and BI for the software development process, perhaps? I have a feeling it is something to do with the aspect of BPM that is “visual coding” of straight-through-processes (for the event community: using BPMN to write single-event-handling applications). Traditionally there is usually insufficient data around to justify regular changes to traditional business processes, but this changes with the advent of analysis. Indeed the need to change processes often can lead to the use of things like rule-driven processes… a pretty common use case for TIBCO BusinessEvents in fact!
3. Dynamic event-based BI driven by BPM – this too can have a number of interpretations!
   • “Event-based BI” could be “event-based analytics”, through CEP. You would normally expect such “events” to drive process changes or business processes directly (e.g. “oooh look, the market trend for “wimbles” has started to go up!”). So this would be detecting events to “drive BPM”, not the other way round.
   • One could have a workflow to control manual views of your BI reports on incoming events – and this is again “BI as a process”.
4. Embedding BI into business processes – although this implied some “BI process” in a business process, I would expect it to be the simpler case of embedding BI results (decision changes, for example) into an existing business process – surely the classic use of BI in BPM… a slightly specialised case of the first point above.

But the above analysis is somewhat moot. More interesting is Layna’s assumption as indicated by the phrase:

BPM vendors realize they need to improve their business processes, rules and event management offerings …

So at least one BPM expert has come to believe that business process management encompasses managing events, rules, and processes… not just “process diagrams”!

If anyone is interested in submitting something on this, note abstracts are due Feb 17.