Melding Business process with Business intelligence, rather opertionalizing busines intelligence, is becoming a hot topic these days. Business intelligence houses are making the journey from being analitical to Predictive to Suggestive. The expectation within the the Enterprises is that business intelligence solutions or products, need to move from just doing analysis of past data to predicting what the future holds and than moving forward be able to suggest also an appropriate course of action.

In this article in the ComputerWorld article titled "ROI Key to Melding BI, Business Processes" they have highlighted certain cases of operationalised intelligence,

Capital One uses intelligent process automation to route calls to 10,000 to 15,000 call center representatives, based on capacity and volume, Hummelberg said. As a result, the company has trimmed the operational costs of its mostly outsourced centers by 12% annually over the past several years while boosting customer satisfaction.The company has also placed a call center application on the desktops of workers in its outsourcers' facilities. It uses analytics to determine potential cross-selling opportunities based on the demographics and previous buying patterns of callers, said David Hummelberg, managing vice president of IT at the McLean, Va.-based financial services firm.

The electricity supplier in White Plains, N.Y., has melded analytics and a rules engine with multiple transactional data sources to provide dashboards for its electricity traders, asset managers and executives, Wayne Sipperly, manager of energy markets analysis at the New York Power Authority said.Since going into production in February 2005, the project has saved traders an hour per day each, yielding $500,000 to $1 million in annual savings for the utility, he said. "You can't try to sell it for human resources," Sipperly advised. "You have to sell it where the dollars are."

Dunkin' Brands, which operates 12,000 Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins stores, is replacing its manual system for collecting retail data with one that ties BI data to business processes. So far, 300 users have been trained on the new system, with another 200 to be trained, As IT personnel create the system, business users are being tapped as data stewards because "they know what the best data is and the source for it," said Rick Broughton, director of IT strategy at Dunkin' Brands Inc. in Canton, Mass.

One of the biggest challenges can be keeping users focused on "practical business processes," said Steve Phillips, CIO at Avnet Inc. Although access to real-time information is often associated with these projects, such a capability isn't always necessary. In fact, Phillips said, if data "isn't needed in real time, it can cause unnecessary work."

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Prashanth Rai