By Jonathan Crow

Continuing coverage of Intalio JapanCon 2008, next up Ben Bushman, one of Intalio’s Process Experts, delivered a presentation on Business Activity Monitoring.

What is Business Intelligence
BI takes data from the operations and submits it to the managing BPM. BAM integrates BI report design into Intalio|Designer. Serves the report to browsers from Intalio|BPMS.

This is a key part of Intalio|BAM. It enables a special way of storing the data occurring in a process. Process variables are not persistent between process instances. The difference between process variables and external variables is that the data from an external variable is stored in a database and can then be used to display information used in reports to make better decisions. Processes, forms, and reports are created in Intalio|Designer. The business analyst and the IT staff work together to define whatever is necessary in Designer, and then deployed to Intalio|Server. As processes are running, the data is saved to a data store to be used by the report generator. This means that the data is displayed in real-time.

Steps to Create a BAM

• Create a metric, something that must be decided at the beginning of the process. When you start designing the process sit down with a high level stakeholder that can define goals and measurements.
• Add metric to process as external variable
• Create a data source
• Define report

Defining variables is a simple operation where you define the name and add specific values and attach a key value, something that identifies it uniquely. The data mapper allows us to track and update the data variable in real-time.

Creating the data source requires knowledge of the target. Intalio can generate the right kind of code for the database you are using.

Defining the report allows you to display the information in the most accessible manner.

Key Performance Indicators are good to put wherever there is a change of state, e.g. from new to revised.

Here Ben went into demo mode. To view a screencast of BAM in action you can go to our Intalio community site.

No other BAM competitor uses external variables. In all the other vendors you have to manually define, select, and map the data. External variables can be simply dragged and dropped into the appropriate area are tracked automatically.

For SAP data business objects, you can drag and drop these the same way. Take the external variable and map them directly into your SAP instance.

Other blog articles in this series:

• Intalio JapanCon 2008: Introducing BPP
• Intalio JapanCon 2008: Henry Peyret - Forrester
  
• Intalio JapanCon 2008: BAM Presentation
• Intalio JapanCon 2008: Liferay Portal
• Intalio JapanCon 2008: Intalio Server Overview

October 5th, 2008