A Framework to Support Business Process Analytics

Business intelligence (BI) systems have become a powerful tool for business users in decision making. Through the analysis of historical (and increasingly, real-time) data, these systems assist end-users in achieving visibility on process and business performance. While traditionally used to discover trends and relationships in large, complex business data sets, there is a significant and growing demand for something more than the use of mere historical data and rudimentary analysis tools. There is a demand for more advanced analytics such as root cause analysis of performance issues, predictive analysis and the ability to perform “what-if” type simulations. This paper proposes a technological solution for one of the core components of these emerging BI systems, namely the ability to monitor and analyse the execution outcomes of business processes. This provides essential insight into business process performance, key intelligence in initiatives aimed at measuring and improving overall business performance, especially in highly distributed business processes, where this type of visibility is especially hard to achieve across heterogeneous systems.