Big Process and Big Data

I’ve just been reading what Clay Richardson over at Forrester is saying around putting data and BI closer to the sharp end of business.

http://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/news/2240037726/Process-intelligence-gains-momentum-at-the-intersection-of-BI-and-BPM?asrc=EM_NLN_14612906&track=NL-544&ad=844365

I am also aware of some of his other work where he talks about Process and Data folks not talking to each other and causing real problems for the business.

Well Clay it’s interesting to note that things haven’t really changed in 30 odd years! Whilst the mentality problems may not have changed, certainly the landscape of data and process has, as indeed have the demands made by business.

My company works at that confluence big time given our work with big data and big process as contained in big application packages such as SAP and Oracle applications – 4 bigs in 1 sentence is quite enough.

I quote from Clay’s interview… “ One of the things Forrester is starting to look at is this idea behind “big data.” Data is everywhere; companies are swimming in data … We’re starting to look at a corollary to big data that we call “big process.”

Further, “Businesses have the data, but the data is tied to fragmented business processes. In an SAP environment or an ERP, they have their own processes, and those processes are creating data differently than their BPM. So we have this fragmented process world that is really on top of all this big data. For companies to be effective in the future, they’ll need to develop a big process perspective that brings data in from different sources and delivers a big picture of how they’re performing”

It’s important for data and process to be communicable

Couldn’t have put it better myself Clay. What we have now is many different process perspectives within the enterprise each with their own perspective on the associated data – 2 perspectives in 1 sentence to add to the 4 bigs!

Now that starts to sound to me like a lot of different data and process people not knowing how to talk to each other. And that’s before you start involving the poor business folks trying to get processes and data to do their “coal face”, customer facing jobs under ever increasing business pressures.

Increasingly we see these good business folks setting up their own solutions for both data and process, using smart front end BI and BPM or Workflow tools and adding yet another set of dialogues with the various IT factions (or not as the case may be).

In our day to day activities we talk with a bewildering range of folks working on the SAP Team, Enterprise Architecture, ETL, BI and data warehouse design, MDM, Data Governance, BPM, data modelling, process modelling and tools and techniques with more acronyms than I care to, or can recall.

So what point am I trying to make here? Well it’s something around all the factions trying harder to take account of each other’s perspective – and focusing on the business issue rather than their own technical perspective. Oh …. and recognising that data and process are inextricably linked – whether it’s big or small data (or process)!

There are some great tools and technologies coming along now for looking at process and data.  We promise to do our bit to talk to all of them using our technology for revealing the data and application process information within the BIG ERP/CRM systems running at company sites (there’s that word again).