The Next Stage of Operational Business Intelligence: Creating New Challenges for Business Process Management

Current practices in the area of business intelligence (BI) and business performance management (BPerM) confirm the need for better integration of BI and business processes (BPs). This is especially the case with operational BI that aims to unify strategic and tactical decision making, by integrating BI solutions with organisation's constantly evolving BPs. However, operational BI has a very limited view of BP and business process management (BProM) systems. In essence, it focuses on a limited number of core, transactional BPs that are, by definition, highly structured and repetitive. This paper argues that in order to support customer-facing employees in service-oriented industries, it is necessary to consider knowledge intensive BPs and their possible integration with operational BI. This paper offers a critical analysis of case-handling BPs in the context of operational BI. It then identifies a number of research challenges related to a new type of case-handling BProM system