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« Searching for NeoView in Vegas | Main | BI, BPM, SOA -- and USERS! » July 05, 2007BI, BPM, and SOA in Action, Together
What's on the horizon for business intelligence? What's business process management got to do with it? And, for that matter, what's service-oriented architecture got to do with it? Those are the questions recently taken up at a panel discussion led by ebizQ's Beth Gold-Bernstein to wrap up the BI in Action virtual conference. I had the opportunity to join Guy Weismantel of Business Objects, Rob Risany of Savvion, and Michael Corcoran of Information Builders for a rousing discussion on how the pieces of BI, BPM and SOA all fit together to greatly amplify the an organization's intelligence. (Transcript and link to the podcast is posted here.) First, the BI-BPM role. As Rob put it, "BPM -- business process management -- basically creates a role for business people that they haven't really had before in enterprise architecture. Business process management gives business people the ability to think about the things that affect them most and turn them into running solutions within the business." BI, in the context of BPM, "is about providing enough information so that the process solutions that are created by businesspeople used in conjunction with IT have enough information so that the right decisions can be made," Rob added. Then, there's BI-SOA. To quote Rob again, "SOA is the infrastructure which IT uses to enable the business initiatives.... BI creates a business face for the data, BPM creates a business face for the process while SOA is an underlying approach for building applications across the business." Examples of the BI-BPM-SOA triangle at work: Disneyland in Paris employs a number of data warehouses and applications to monitor events around the park in real time. "They can determine if they need to move Disney characters around different parts of the park based on the crowd levels and crowd flows," Guy said. "They can get more food and move inventory around based on the lunch crowd and the dinner crowd in different parts of the theme park." Another theme park, Universal Studios in Orlando, employs a BPM engine to streamline its planning and budgeting processes. The system enables the park's managers to "reduce the cycle time that it takes to go ahead and do budgeting," Guy explained. "Universal is probably one of the most unique companies in that they actually do planning and budgeting on a daily basis," versus once a year or so. The reason Universal plans daily is "because conditions at their theme park in Orlando are always changing and the plan for, you know, June 19th of 2007 is going to be different than the plan for June 19th of 2006. The weather could have been different, the day of the week could have been different, different rides could have been functional or not operational so they have a limited ability to go ahead and take past information and make some sense of it now they certainly use that but they're always look at the conditions during that day in the park and what they can forecast." Universal would not be able to accomplish this "unless they had the planning and budgeting and more performance management environment tied in real closely with the key processes that help them drive the business," Guy added. Motorola has built and leverages business intelligence on top of ongoing process data which is automatically gathered in audit trails, which is used to track SOA compliance. The reported data is also analyzed "to find anomalies in the specific products that are causing a service level problem," Rob explained, such as order delivery to drop ships to customers. "The role of BI in action in that regard is one of how can I affect the strategic decision making, of how I can improve the process overall." What's holding back organizations from really moving forward with the new BI-BPM-SOA paradigm? Michael reported that many companies will say that "'we're not doing anything with BI right now because we're very focused on our architecture.' I think you have to broaden that thought process to say 'BI is part of the architecture, it's a service in a service-oriented world.'" "There is no such thing as a perfect architecture," Michael continued. "I still see organizations who haven't done anything for twelve years just because they're waiting for that wonderful CORBA architecture or whatever the new standard was at the time. I think the perfect architecture is the one that works, the one that you can use to integrate and leverage now.... it's all about business needs, not technology needs." Posted by joemckendrick in Business Intelligence | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry: One way to bring data to bear on processes is through a focus on decisions. Decision Services are a class of service in SOA, a great way to make processes smarter and allow for insight derived from your data to be injected. Posted by: James Taylor |
