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You can learn a lot about the benefits and functionalities of the  process intelligence approach while browsing through the pages on process-intelligence.com. To bring you the process information you seek, and to analyze, arrange and present it to you, in the way you need it and when you need it, the data and processing systems for process intelligence are assembled and applied in special ways.  Let’s have a look behind the scenes to see what makes up an information architecture for process intelligence.

Here you see the main functionalities and architecture of Process Intelligence:

The value and the power of Process Intelligence are founded on the data available in a company. There are typically two different approaches to collect data, which both must be supported by the PI architecture: data extraction and data observation.

With data extraction, you retrieve data from databases and systems that support the business processes. Typical applications include ERP and CRM systems. PI extractions may fetch large amounts of data at once, in order to gain the insight needed about the performance of a process. This allows you to analyze the data of last year in the very moment you turn on the PI solution. In data observation mode, you’re simply watching and monitoring activities in the IT universe, through loosely-coupled applications or services, connected via a common bus using SOA architecture. This way, you can support real time interactions and detect complex events using a complex event processing engine.

PI processing sculpts buckets and jumbles of information into powerful intelligence.  You can access this intelligence through the visualization tools, and you can feed the results via Services into your BPM engine to control processes directly.  Processing is the most complex part of the PI information system, with many different subsystems.  Let’s pick out some of the important ones here:

  • Process and Organizational Discovery: This is the capability to generate a process from uncorrelated events.  Each instance of a business activity is captured, and the process is assembled automatically. More information you can find in my blog post “it’s all about behavior”. The process discovery indeed is a very challenging task. Imagine you read thousands or millions of steps from different systems using data extraction, e.g. thousands of “creating offer” activities from the CRM system and thousands of “create order” activities from the ERP. The process discovery must be able to do this matching within seconds or minutes to be able to keep the process instances up-to-date. Unfortunately, you can’t expect the data to be ordered correctly during extraction.

  • Event processing sets the rules and conditions for detecting specific events, and then generating the information and outputs that enable both people and systems to respond appropriately.  An advanced form, known as Complex event processing (CEP), addresses the larger challenge of detecting a pattern based on many events, and correlating them, analyzing the impact, and then recommending action.  Process intelligence emerges as users can understand larger issues that emanate from individual processes.

  • Alertsare notices when exceptions occur. You can set limits for any metric or KPI, in any process.  If the value of the metric ever breaches the limit, you’re alerted.  An alert can be as simple as an email or as complex as triggering a new business process using the event bus or SOA infrastructure.

  • Interactive KPI Analysis: Sometimes, you just want to examine a single measure or performance indicator and quickly understand what’s happening.  With interactive KPI analysis, you can select any measurement item and perform analysis, such as comparisons and dependencies, right there in real time.  An interactive analyzer looks for outliers, so it’s easy to find the trouble spots or outstanding performers and determine what’s causing them.

After all the data collection and information processing, the intelligence still has yet to get into your head.  This last step is best accomplished by creating visuals – charts, graphs, pictures – as the best ways for you to really grasp the full breadth of information, and this is probably the part of PI you will see live on stage. Graphical dashboards with mashup technology allow just about anyone to build interactive graphical views of processes.  They take KPIs generated from data out of the processing layer from real time information as well as historical data and present it in ways that are well-suited for your needs. Interactive tools help to analyze data and relationships providing experts with the knowledge they need.

Social interactionis becoming more important as users want to interact and share content. The idea of community is part of your process intelligence – to emphasize the role of the user, and to increase the spread of knowledge about processes and performance across a company and its value streams. This does not only sound cloudy, it will probably also happen in the cloud.

To summarize, you see that Process Intelligence offers a large portfolio of functionalities in an architectural stack to provide the right information to the right people at the right time.

 

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