Blog: Craig Schiff

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Questions I Get Asked A lot - #1 BPM vs. BI

I just returned from the annual BPM Summit held in beautiful Greenwich, CT where I once again heard the same three questions I always get asked. So, I thought I'd answer them here and maybe not have to answer them at the next conference I speak at (I know, not likely). Question #1: How does BPM differ from BI? BPM, Business Performance Management, is actually the application of BI (business intelligence) to address a strategic business need. BPM is a collection of BI tools, domain expertise, and specialized applications to help a company, plan, monitor, and hopefully improve its performance. Whether a BPM vendor sells and manufactures BI tools or not, they are always part of the BPM solution, maybe just bundled in and hidden. BPM makes extensive use of relational databases, multi-dimensional databases (OLAP), datamarts, unstructured data repositories, extract transform and load tools, report and query capabilities, portals, and dashboards. A Performance Dashboard is a BI dashboard tool populated with a collection of key performance indicators, sometimes called a scorecard (Balanced or not). The current momentum and interest in BPM is helping drive the accelerating adoption of BI across the enterprise and explains why every BI vendor wants to be part of BPM either through mergers or partnerships.

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