Johannesburg, 04 Feb 2009
The purpose of business intelligence (BI) has always been to provide companies with a subset of its data in a format that assists management and workers in making better decisions, and thereby enhancing the efficiency of the organisation.
To streamline a company's performance effectively, BI tools integrate information from a wide variety of data sources and process the results through a series of analysis tools that remove the task of sifting through endless reams of data from users.
The user, whether a manager looking at forecasts or an administrator ensuring the stores will have enough stock to meet the next month's demand, simply clicks a button and incorporates the results into his/her thinking.
"While the efficacy of BI as an information aggregator as well as a decision enhancer is beyond question," says Marc Scheepbouwer, MD of Intellient, "its utility as a productivity enhancer is only now being discovered as business process management becomes common and is integrated with BI. Of course, the basic premise of BI is that the data used is reliable. Without data that can be implicitly trusted, BI is a non-starter, especially in financial organisations where decisions can only be made if the information used is based on accurate figures."
Accurate data, fortunately, is achievable when employing the correct BI processes and tools. And with reliable data at hand, companies are able to safely deploy BI systems and tools, empowering users simply to use the data at their disposal without wasting time and effort in double-checking data or bothering others for comparable information.
Incorporating business process management (BPM) as part of the BI process ensures productivity is further enhanced as BI's benefits are expanded to every corner of the business in near real-time - if that is what the business requires. BPM is a step beyond the traditional idea of workflow in that it plays an important role in optimising business performance. Current BPM software suites do more than provide a pathway to transfer information, delivering integrated toolsets that are able to design, model, simulate and deploy custom processes, providing user organisations with improved process management and the ability to deliver significant productivity improvements.
When BI is integrated into the BPM system, it facilitates the automated transfer of information to the relevant people to expedite the fulfilment of their jobs. Instead of waiting for a manager or some supervisor-level employee to analyse and send information manually to people, automated processes ensure the analysis is done as soon as the data is available and the right information is immediately sent to the right people.
"To complete jobs effectively in today's environment, as much information as possible is necessary," adds Scheepbouwer. "By making the most up-to-date and reliable information available, employees are able to improve their productivity substantially. Of course, when the information is guaranteed to be accurate and has already been analysed and reduced to the content and format specific to each task, the employee can simply get on with the value-adding part of the task without wasting time working with data."
Today's BPM technology processes that are user-intensive look after customer servicing as efficiently as system-intensive processes, integrating both into productivity enhancing value-adding applications.
"Integrating BI and BPM is a natural progression for business," concludes Scheepbouwer. "Individually each delivers measurable benefits to the business, when combined in the process of getting the right information to each employee as and when they need it, productivity is increased, data errors are eliminated and human employees can be focused on work that adds value instead of mind numbing number crunching, or data verification tasks."
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