Jim Sinur

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Jim Sinur
Research VP
2 years at Gartner
42 years IT industry

Jim Sinur is a vice president in Gartner Research after a short stint with a BPM vendor. Prior to that, Mr. Sinur was with Gartner 15 years and helped establish the BPI/BPM areas at Gartner and is considered a thought leader. His research and areas… Read Full Bio

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Transforming BI to Optimize Organizations Leveraging Processes

by Jim Sinur  |  February 23, 2009  |  4 Comments

A while back, I wrote on companies driving through their rearview mirrors See mirrors. I wrote that organizations needed to change to Intelligent Decision Management, but did not hint much at what would have to change. In order to move to a more forward looking approach, there are three things that have to be added to BI to transform it. Today BI performs traditional offline analytics while exploring data in an explanatory fashion, which is a good base for trending and looking at what might have been done and looking for patterns to alter rules, behaviors and associations.

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BI will need to employ inline analytics as well as offline analytics. Not only will dashboards have to be applied to in flight processes, analytics will be brought to bear to processes and the cases that are being managed in the context of the process. These analytics will have to go from after the fact explanations to predictive analytics to enable organizations towards productive change. Last and not least, BI will have to deal with sensing events that may or may not be related, which implies leveraging of heuristics and/or pattern matching. As a result of forward looking inline behavior, BI will have to derive and emit events for downstream effects and potentially kick off subsequent processes and/or suggest rule changes..This is not your fathers BI, but Intelligent Decision Management (IDM)

4 Comments »

Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules Optimization Simulation     Tags: , , , ,

4 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Neil Raden   March 3, 2009 at 2:13 pm

    Hi Jim,

    I know that Paul Vincent and Tim Bass like to tussle a lot over the meaning of Complex Event Processing (CEP), but I fear you may be setting off another Talmudic discussion with the term Intelligent Decision Management. When James and I wrote the book, we shoe-horned Decision Management into a certain class of high-volume, low-risk decisions, which is why we dubbed them “smart enough.” By adding “Intelligent” to the mix, along with your description above, I fear you may be raising expectations far beyond current capabilities. Not that the BI industry doesn’t need a good kick in the pants, but we should be careful not to over-promise. Even with the resources at our disposal, automating even simple decisions is still devilishly difficult.

    -NR

  • 2 Jim Sinur   March 3, 2009 at 2:49 pm

    I don’t think that leveraging rules and events in processes management is that far out. I know of companies that have done this already. It will take some time, however before it becomes common.

  • 3 Paul Vincent   March 20, 2009 at 10:29 am

    Not sure why Neil mentioned me in the comments here… perhaps trying to compare the acceptance of the terms “CEP” and “IDM”? Or maybe because of the application of CEP to event-driven BI?

    CEP of course is an *industry term* (see http://www.ep-ts.com or complexevents.com) – indeed Gartner’s Roy Schulte is co-chair of the EPTS Glossary Working Group.

    IDM is, AFAIK, more of a Gartner term at this point in time? Might be it is comparable to “event-based analytics”, “operational BI”, “machine learning” etc. I don’t see a problem using the term “intelligent” for a process that performs expertly, can adapt, and can explain itself…

    Cheers

  • 4 BPM Leverages Information   June 4, 2009 at 7:16 am

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