This year’s Business process management conference hosted several discussions about the (non)connectivity between business processes in companies with business intelligence. The theme was introduced by a professor from the Zagreb Economic Faculty who presented research into this area with a case study and concluded with a round table of IT managers from various local companies. More or less everyone agreed that the areas of business process management and business intelligence are currently not interconnected enough and discussed what benefits could be achieved if they were.
They mentioned several examples of how the business users required reports and analyses that were produced by the business intelligence department. But reports themselves don’t necessarily illustrate that business intelligence is aware of business processes. The question remains whether those who design business processes in companies take into account the consideration how they will analyze them or measure their effectiveness, what data will be needed to do so, how often will the data have to be updated in in what format.
It all comes down to data. Do those who design business processes followed by those who design IT solutions for the business process think about what data needs to be captured so that it will be eventually available for analyses? Do they know that only well defined data of a good quality is useful for business intelligence? It isn’t enough to ask how to get information out of data. Without good data there is no magic wand to create information. We should really ask: do we have good quality relevant data from which we could get useful information?