Question: BI and BPM.* Nearly all business processes involve complex value-based decision points, such as loan approvals or up-sell opportunities. Complex decision making may require information that often is not delivered within the workflow, and decision makers must spend time gathering the information required to support the decision. Surveys show that users, on average, spend 20 h/week gathering and analyzing information. This ad hoc activity may be informal or formal, ranging from accessing and querying a database to soliciting advice from coworkers. Whatever the approach, this information-gathering step adds processing time and may create bottlenecks while taking workers away from more productive uses of their time and talent.

This leads to inefficient and ineffective processes. Organizations that have invested in BI solutions to spread the culture of analytics in an organization must make sure that the right information is available to the decision makers in their business processes. The merging of BI and BPM incorporates the right analytic reports from a BI system into a process workflow. The result is that when the workflow gets routed to a decision maker, it is accompanied by relevant and timely information that supports the decision. Give an example of how a business process may benefit from the merger of BI and BMP in the following industries:

a. Banking

b. Health care