The Importance of Business Process

In a fast moving industry like the software business, terminology is quickly adopted, modified and frequently abused by vendors. It is unusual for one term to survive relatively unscathed for an extended period of time. For example, while enterprise resource planning (ERP) survives intact, the sheer number of project failures means that customer relationship management (CRM) is not the golden phrase that it once seemed.

At the ERP end of the scale, we can comfortably position the term Business Intelligence (BI), coined nearly two decades ago and still going strong. But what does the term actually mean? Is it about data warehousing, basic reporting tools, complex analytics or predictive analytics? There are multiple interpretations couched under the umbrella mantle of BI.

But whatever interpretation is applied to the term, one thing remains constant: BI software is not the answer to any business problem in its own right. You cannot just deploy a BI tool and expect it to put you on the right course, any more than simply installing some Siebel applications was ever going to improve your customer relationships. In CRM, if the underlying attitude of an organisation was that customers were a nuisance, then all the Siebel software in the world would simply automate that negative attitude, not correct it.

"The need to map onto business processes is all the more acute with BI tools," says Donald MacCormick, VP of analytical applications at Business Objects. "ERP and supply chain applications actually all have built-in business processes. They exist to address those business processes. On the other hand, BI tools can do many things. In theory you can, of course, apply them in a way that is not tied to the business processes. You often hear that the benefits of BI are intangible or are expressed in vague terms like getting information quicker. To my mind that means you're in a situation where you're not sure what the value actually is," he says.

"You need to tie BI to the business or to a business process where you can see the difference it is making. Enterprise Rent A Car in the US is a good example. Unless users could explain what the business use was that they would put a new computer system to, then it was taken away from them. They had to be able to articulate what the business use of the technology was going to be before it was used."

"It's about having the right amount of information," MacCormick adds. "Give users too little information and they won't see the value of using the technology; give them too much and they'll drift into feeling that having too much information makes them comfortable. Unless information is tied to something that's going to make the business perform better then do you need it?

"Whatever you're writing reports for, you have to understand what it is that people are going to do with them when they get them. It has to be actionable information that you're creating. If you can't see a path to which this information can become actionable, then warning bells should be going off.

"It doesn't need to be particularly sophisticated. If someone is repairing machines in a factory and there are 500 machines but only time to mend one each day, then you need to know which machine needs to be addressed most urgently. That kind of simple information might mean that you keep the machines operational and don't have to open another plant or lay people off when the company stops operating as efficiently because some of the machines break down."

So BI tools can automate and improve data collection, provisioning and analysis, but if you do not know how this is going to impact on the bottom line of your business it is questionable whether it is worth investing in such technology. BI tools will only deliver genuine competitive advantage if and when they are aligned with underlying business processes.

That BI technology has become increasingly sophisticated is not in doubt. Tools have evolved over the years from simply delivering reports to leveraging advanced visualisation techniques to quickly detect key patterns and trends. In the beginning it was all about pandering to the report-generating nature of most corporate cultures. Paper chases were automated and activity and progress reports printed off.

Then came the awareness of the need for greater analysis. On the back of the relational database mass adoption, vendors delivered ad hoc query tools and online analytical processing (OLAP) tools that let users 'slice and dice' data. But such technology brought its own problems.

From having difficulty gathering and accessing and analysing data, organisations suddenly found themselves in a position to collate and analyse vast amounts of data. But all too often this simply resulted in the generation of more data. What was missing was the ability to turn this data into useful information that in turn could be used as the basis for commercially sensible decision-making.

Data is important of course. "All too often, when people talk of BI they talk about the modelling and presentation tools in isolation of the data that feeds these tools," says Dan Higgins, director of Teradata Warehouse sales support. "Without the right data, the modelling and presentation tools are at best inefficient and at worst they can be misleading, creating a false sense of security in the information. The foundation of BI must be timely, accurate, detailed, integrated, cross-functional and relevant data. For BI to be truly effective and deliver value to the business it must be seen as an enterprise-wide initiative. Otherwise the organisation will struggle with severely limited, inconsistent and often conflicting information.

"When planning business intelligence improvement projects successful companies consider their ability to execute - design, build and deploy the capabilities - the readiness of the enterprise to exploit the new capabilities and the strategic and tactical value of those capabilities," he adds.

"They leverage people, processes, data and technology in a rapid, iterative, evolutionary cycle. This cycle - or spiral - continually expands the depth and breadth of the underlying enterprise data warehouse while concurrently delivering new BI capabilities to the business."

In addition, many of the techniques underlying OLAP and other analysis tools were fundamentally too complex for the lay business user who needed to be able to get access to the information that they were capable of producing.

"We have plenty of users who use BI for technical operations and applications, but if you really want to achieve a higher benefit then you need to link this to your business processes," says Ad Voogt, European senior VP at Cognos. "If you want to get information instead of data, then you need to think in terms of your wider business strategy. It's all about giving the right amount of data to the right people at the right time. You need to identify a strategy that can turn data into meaningful information.

"There has traditionally been a lot of emphasis placed on data collection and data delivery. Companies have cultures that are all about collecting information, even if that results in many cases in collecting duplicate information. Larger companies in particular are now interested in setting data strategies that eliminate that duplication and are built around having a central data repository. If that's in place, then you can more easily keep track of what should be monitored, managed and maintained. That will make business requirements like compliance with Sarbanes Oxley and the like easier."

Broadening appeal

The 'lay user' is likely to become an ever more pressing consideration for BI vendors. "The BI market is evolving to move beyond traditional query and reporting tools, toward solutions that help drive actions, customer interactions, and operational processes," says John Morley, VP EMEA, Siebel analytics.

"As part of this, organisations are deploying BI capabilities and insight far more broadly, incorporating new and far larger audiences of BI users, and leveraging far larger data volumes. These new users will not be the traditional 'power users' of BI technology, such as business analysts, but regular business people such as sales professionals, human resource managers, or call centre personnel. So the solutions must first be easy to use, must scale to large audiences of users, etcetera.

"But it also requires that insight be delivered that is tailored by role, and delivered in the context of a person's 'job flow'. This could include delivering a cross-sell recommendation in real-time within a call centre agent's desktop, using business intelligence to trigger or affect a business workflow, sending an intelligent text message to a field sales person, or delivering personalised role-based dashboards over the Web to each knowledge worker in the company," says Morley.

This issue is one of the reasons why many BI vendors, while still basically comfortable with the term, now also talk of themselves as business performance management (BPM) companies. "While we are comfortable with the BI terminology which is so well known in the business, we do see BI as a key to business performance management, where one angle is what we call BI and one is planning," says Cognos's Voogt. "BI can analyse what happened to your company in the past; planning helps you to move intelligently forward into the future."

BPM suites combine the analytic and reporting functionality of traditional BI tools, but are typically more tightly integrated into applications such as Excel, which are inherently familiar to the type of business person who needs to base their working decisions on the data being churned in them. Budget, management and planning tools are bundled together with reporting and analysis technology, creating a complete suite that - in theory - is also mapped on to the underlying business processes as well.

The final element is making the data presentation more accessible to the business user. BI tools in the traditional form can find and produce data, but if it is not in a presentable form that mirrors the business processes it is intended to support, then lay users will struggle to use it.

The solution is an interface on top of analysis, reporting and planning tools that pulls them all together in an intuitive dashboard or scorecard. These enable business users to track or monitor the few metrics they care about most, compare actual performance to predefined targets and trigger alerts when performance strays too far from goals.

There is a reason why Microsoft Office and Excel are successful. It is because everyone can use them, whereas only a handful of people - relatively speaking - can operate an OLAP reporting tool. No surprise then that Microsoft is making such a big push to integrate as many BI tools with its office productivity applications. For example, Microsoft Business Scorecard Manager 2005 tightly integrates with the Microsoft Office and Microsoft SharePoint portal environments. Products supported by this include Excel, Visio, Project, InfoPath, SharePoint, MapPoint, Access and Analysis Services.

Users also need to be able to customise these dashboards to meet their specific business requirements. This leads to the concept of the Business User Workspace, populated by all of the business content needed to perform their daily tasks.

User-friendly results

This content will typically consist of business processes and workflows, business applications and business information. That business information will be pulled from operational systems using traditional, but - crucially - unseen BI tools. Such integrated applications, which exploit the functionality of BI tools 'beneath the covers' but present the results in a user-friendly manner that is mapped to the underlying business needs, are clearly the future.

CBR Opinion

Data is the lifeblood of any organisation, but it is all too easy to drown in what has become known as the data deluge. Technologies to root out, gather, consolidate and store data have been evolving for over three decades. But gathering data for data's sake is of little use unless it can be turned into information that can be used for business decision making. The initial promise of BI was valid, but the tools were too complex for their business users. Integrated user-friendly applications that are enabled by BI technology, but can be used for specific business processes by non-technical users are now emerging to deliver on the promise of BI.