Business Process Management (BPM) refers to disciplines, methodologies, and tools for managing the operations within an organization aiming at ensuring the consistency of the final products and finding opportunities for improving quality and efficiency. Coming to Business Intelligence (BI), its purpose is to exploit and interpret data to enable more effective decision-making at either strategic, tactical, or operational levels. However, the objective is not just the data since the change will come by changing the processes.

1. Business Process Management and Business Intelligence
Panagiotis Papaioannou
University of Piraeus
Hellenic Society for Systemic Studies (HSSS)
p.papaioannou@gmail.com
15
th
HSSS National & International Conference
November 29-30, 2019
Business Process Management (BPM) refers to disciplines, methodologies, and tools for
managing the operations within an organization aiming at ensuring the consistency of the
final products and finding opportunities for improving quality and efficiency.
A central concept in BPM is the “business process” defined as a transformation that, through
a set of activities, transforms process inputs to process outputs. The whole organization is a
single yet complicated process. To overcome the management complexity of that whole, we
decomposed it into a “network” or system of processes that interact with each other,
exchange data or materials, and, altogether, produce the final product(s) of the
organization.
There are many benefits of applying BPM practices in an organization, starting from the
most obvious that is the transparency in operations. Consequent benefits are better
functioning of the organization in terms of efficiency and compliance as well as market
positioning in terms of product quality, customer satisfaction, and agility in the business
environment changes.
Coming to Business Intelligence (BI), its purpose is to exploit and interpret data to enable
more effective decision-making at either strategic, tactical, or operational levels. However,
the objective is not just the data since the change will come by changing the processes.
Thus, BI makes sense when it ends up with BPM initiatives that put in action the conclusions
arising from BI techniques and data exploitation. Apart from that, there is also a reverse
relation between BI and BPM. BI supports BPM by providing findings of process execution
based on data collected from information systems log files, technique known as process
mining.
BPM combines information technology and management sciences and applies them to the
business processes that operate within an organization. Moreover, BPM involves people
coming from different parts and levels of the organization; Process Owners, the
management team, process participants, process analysts, IT systems engineers and,
sometimes, external stakeholders. For this reason, BPM goes beyond mere specialization
and becomes an interdisciplinary subject. On the other hand, BI uses data to create business
knowledge than will affect business decisions. Especially when starting a BI project,
evaluating what conclusions, reports, dashboards, or KPIs are worth for the organization is a
task that involves people coming from different departments and having diverse expertise or
authority. Thus, it is a cross-field application that requires an interdisciplinary approach.
In this workshop, the discussion will revolve around the fundamental aspects of BPM, the
essential BI functions, and how the systemic approaches and methodologies can contribute
to this complex, cross-field, and cross-boundary issue, facilitating collaboration and bringing
innovative solutions.