Jim Sinur

We have made great strides in integrating data across multiple application stacks and data integration has had a great impact on giving a better picture of what’s happening in the business while being able to move and transform data amongst disparate systems. Data marts have sprung up that combine data for trending and the generation of helpful downstream information. Unfortunately this is only a step in a longer journey. Today some of the most important Information is disjoint, not in context of the business and not timely enough to compete in today’s fast moving world.

Information Needs Multiple New Tributaries:

In order to compile a current business/process state, we will need more than just integrated and extracted data operational data from purchased applications and legacy systems of record. There is important information that needs to be brought to the eyes of the process and knowledge workers with visibility to the processes managers. These new sources include content such as images, graphics, forms, rule driven micro content etc, email, web content such as blogs, Wikis, social nets, mash-ups etc, and events/complex events. Even though some of these sources are new and the uses are just emerging, BPM should take them into account for a 360 view of the process information necessary to support the “heads down” process worker and the emerging knowledge worker processes. In addition, new information needs to be scoured for emerging patterns that may be sensed in the completion of a case or a process.

Information Sources Need to be Usefully Aggregated:

Process is the new additional view/window to business activity that has the ability to view information in a way to optimize operational business activity and give a personalized view for workers and managers at multiple levels. This means that information should be delivered in a way that is useful to the organizational role viewing/leveraging said information while considering the needs/desires individual working with it. This means that the information also needs to be meaningful to individuals for the step in the process it is delivered in at the moment. This may mean considering more than format, culture, role and personal preferences, but also adding downstream value delivering knowledge leveraged information by combing multiple information sources and making the information ready for interactions with certain trending and projection modeling algorithms. Signals may have to be clustered and/or aggregated for management awareness.

Information Needs to be Timely:

In the ultimate scenario for BPM, information needs to be immediate with little or no lag for certain performance information combined with tolerable lags for certain trending information. This will put a premium on complex event processing and combining these events with traditional information. While most would dismiss this kind of immediacy for their industry segments and would say this is only necessary for market sensitive transactions. The needs are evolving and emerging for industry segments that were considered insular to the winds of change. Timely information tied to leveraged and anticipated strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats will be the minimum price of admission, going forward. These sensing opportunities may or may not be planned, but are often caught in the net of process exceptions.

Information Needs to be in Context:

In order for properly organized, aggregated, timely and useful information to be leveraged for the business, it needs to be put in context. At a minimum, it needs to be understood in the flow/evolution of process(s). This means understanding the status of work in a process and the utilization rates of resources being applied to the process. At a maximum, this allows workers to turn even ultimately kinetic information into knowledge that the wisdom needed to perform actions. This may mean identifying crucial opportunities for action such as lost revenue, wasted material, idle workers, compliance issues, prevention opportunities, missed deadlines, broken business rules, stock outs, angry customers, new best practices and so on. It may mean keeping track of the process in it’s market and geographical/cultural context.

Information Needs to be Actionable:

Proper actions should be provided to deal with new insights delivered by better information within processes. This means that one can anticipate the conditions that may show up in the information. This is probably true of 70% of conditions. The rest of the 30% will be identified for additional analysis, so one can learn to provide programmed actions. Certainly knowledge workers play an important role in deciding and accumulating and archiving information about these challenging situations; looking for patterns and suggesting alternatives to policy makers.

, BPM affords a very different use of information in addition to the traditional uses. As we enter the kind of complexities that evolving processes bring, I expect more rapid evolution of information leverage. This gives new light to some new information forms and structures. I can see ontological patterns emerging here when tied to indeterminate, unstructured and evolving processes.

Related Postings:

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/04/22/finding-the-blue-candy-is-like-discovering-germane-business-events/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/05/21/the-power-of-visibility-with-bpm-enabled-processes/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/04/16/social-nets-and-bpm/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/03/12/automated-business-process-discovery-helps-visually-optimize-processes/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/04/02/matching-measurements-to-your-process-efforts/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/03/31/processes-enable-early-warning-for-emerging-business-scenarios/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/02/23/transforming-bi-to-optimize-organizations-leveraging-processes/

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Category: BPM Business Process Improvement     Tags: BPM, Business Process Improvement

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