According to Gartner, one of the more effective techniques for business process improvement is intelligent business operations (IBO), in which processes are "aware" of and can learn from a wide range of work interactions, their context and the situations around them. Once a situation is sensed, analytics can be applied actively or on-demand to predict the outcomes of potential changes.

"The impact of integrating real-time analytics with business operations is immediately apparent to business people because it changes the way they do their jobs," said Jim Sinur, research vice president at Gartner.

"The most dramatic change is the increased visibility in how the company is running and what is happening in its external environment. Individual contributors and managers have more situational awareness, so they are able to make better decisions faster."

As a result, the analyst company notes that organizations with real-time analytic and decision management capabilities perform better. Improved situational awareness leads to better and faster decision making and superior customer service, revenue growth, cost reduction and risk avoidance. Gartner said that virtually every business operation has one or more areas where real-time analytic services or active analytics should be applied.

"It has been technically possible to implement real-time analytics in transactional and record-keeping operational applications for decades. However, few business processes or operational applications have actually used them until recently," said Sinur.

He added that, as the sources of business event data proliferate and business application management, complex event processing, rule management, visualization, business process management, optimization and other software tools improve, IBO is rapidly becoming a more practical and popular solution.

Source: Procurement Leaders