Progress Software and Joe Isuzu: Process Intelligence, Not Business Agility
Those readers with long memories may still cherish the old Isuzu car commercials with Joe Isuzu, the smarmy salesman. “This car can fly!” he might announce, and a little message at the bottom of the TV screen would say, “Well, no. But we do get 32 miles per gallon.” Oozing sincerity, he might promise “cashmere seats, shipped directly from Mongolia,” and the little message would say, “Actually, we don't. We do provide leather seats with ergonomic adjustment.” Recently, reading a Progress Software-sponsored white paper on Process Intelligence, I was reminded of old Joe.
It appears that Process Intelligence is an outgrowth of Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) — that is, an approach that embeds analytics in an innovative three-tier (strategy, process, operations) “process for monitoring and improving business processes.” This fits very nicely with today's trend of embedding analytics in various IT and business processes, to allow the actionable insights that presently are provided only by examination of data warehouses and Big Data to extend to an organization's business-critical processes, such as book-to-bill or supply chain management. Moreover, it allows users to automate parts of the task of gathering insights and acting on them: you can embed in some of your Process Intelligence models — the parts that drive the monitoring tasks — a directive to automatically monitor a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) like time taken per customer, and automatically arrange for “load balancing” of customer service when time taken reaches a certain threshold, well before a crisis arrives.
What, in Progress' view, are the main benefits of Process Intelligence for the typical organization? As it says in the title of the white paper, the key benefits are visibility into the organization's entire linking of business strategy to execution, which lets the organization align with corporate performance objectives better; and business agility, by letting the organization more quickly adjust business processes for greater efficiency or in response to changes in the outside world. Thus, one claimed part of Process Intelligence's benefits is that, in effect, it yields additional agile business intelligence (BI).
Now here's where old Joe comes in. According to my research, the long-term benefits of improved business agility are far greater than those of visibility, including the positive effects on the organization's bottom line. And yet I find that Process Intelligence, both as a concept and in Progress Software's present Process Intelligence-related solutions, in and of itself has no obvious major positive effect on business agility. In fact, if applied carelessly, it even potentially could have a small negative effect on business agility.
Progress and Pitfall
To understand why, let's take a closer look at Progress' Process Intelligence solution, as a well-designed and well-implemented example of the genre. The Progress Responsive Management Suite is a BPM (business process management) solution designed to complement process intelligence in today's fast-changing business environments and processes. It includes Progress' event processing and transaction management capabilities, and adds monitoring via dashboards, visual results display, automation of key process parts or alerts, and a design/development environment specializing in rapid business process software creation, deployment and extension. These are straightforward extensions of Progress' traditional strengths in data management and development, and especially its powerful event-processing engine.
Such a solution cannot help but improve the visibility of key information to those who should be taking action on it. Combined with a strategy of implementing Process Intelligence, it makes alerting to arrival of important data faster and more pervasive, makes the meaning of that data clearer to the individual worker, and encourages faster upgrades of the whole system to improve visibility further or to handle changes in the organization's environment that make new kinds of information “key.”
Business agility is a very different kettle of fish, however. Very briefly, business agility is the ability of the business as a whole to handle both reactive and proactive change. Studies suggest that improving business agility can have a profound long-term positive effect on revenues, costs and customer satisfaction. Other studies suggest that increasing the agility of new product development has the most powerful positive effect on business agility, and improving the agility of IT in general or making business processes other than new product development agile has much less of a positive effect. The studies indicate that improving business agility is a matter of embedding a focus on handling change into culture, processes, and tools, and not of speeding up or making more flexible an un-agile process. In fact, “improvements” in such processes that leave them still unable to adapt to major changes in the environment or anticipate those changes can decrease business agility in the long run, because the improvements create additional “legacy” code and processes that can actually slow your reaction to a radically changed environment — and, of course, the improvements will need to be undone when you really attempt to improve business agility.
Page 2: Process Intelligence and Business Agility
Wayne Kernochan of Infostructure Associates has been an IT industry analyst focused on infrastructure software for more than 20 years.
Wayne Kernochan has been an IT industry analyst and auther for over 15 years. He has been focusing on the most important information-related technologies as well as ways to measure their effectiveness over that period. He also has extensive research on the SMB, Big Data, BI, databases, development tools and data virtualization solutions. Wayne is a regular speaker at webinars and is a writer for many publications.
