Nicolas Marzin, from the TIBCO BPM field group, presented a breakout session on the benefits of combining BPM and analytics — I’m not sure that anyone really needs to be convinced of the benefits, although plenty of organizations don’t implement this very well (or at all) so it obviously isn’t given a high priority is some situations.
BPM analytics have a number of different audiences — end users, team leaders, live of business managers, and customer service managers — and each of them are interested in different things, from operational performance to customer satisfaction measures. Since we’re talking about BPM analytics, most of these are focused on processing work, but different views and aspects of that process-related information. Regardless of the information that they seek, the analytics need to be ease to use as well as informative, and focused on how analytics is more driven by questions that more static reporting.
There are some key BPM metrics regardless of industry:
- Work backlog breakdown, including by priority, segment and skillset (required to determine resourcing requirements) or SLA status (required to calculate risk)
- Resource pool and capacity
- Aggregate process performance
- Business data-specific measures, e.g., troublesome products or top customers
Monitoring and analytics are important not just for managing daily operations, but also to feed back into process improvement: actions taken based on the analytics can include work reprioritization, resource reallocation, or a request for process improvement. Some of these actions can be automated, particularly the first two; there’s also value in doing an in situ simulation to predict the impacts of these actions on the SLAs or costs.
By appropriately combining BPM and analytics, you can improve productivity, improve visibility, reduce time to action and improve the user experience. A good summary of the benefits; as I mentioned earlier, this is likely not really news to the customer in the audience, but I am guessing that a lot of them are not yet using analytics to the full extent in their BPM implementations, and this information might help them to justify it.
In AMX BPM, Spotfire was previously positioned for analytics and visualization, but TIBCO’s acquisition of Jaspersoft means that they are now bundling Jaspersoft with AMX BPM. You can use either (or both), and I think that TIBCO needs to get on top of identifying the use cases for each so that customers are not confused by two apparently overlapping BPM analytics solutions. Spotfire allows for very rich interactive visualizations of data from multiple sources, including drill-downs and what-if scenarios, especially when the analysis is more ad hoc and exploratory; Jaspersoft is better suited for pre-defined dashboards for monitoring well-understood KPIs.