IT organizations serve the business. Their mission is to help optimize business operations to enhance performance across the enterprise and enable the organization to meet mission-critical goals. With the rapid pace of change, it’s critical to make smarter, faster decisions around business processes to generate a tangible, measurable impact.
Effective decisions come from having the right data. You can ask and gain insight from business partners and stakeholders, but business intelligence data helps you model the outcomes, pinpoint bottlenecks, and make real adjustments to processes.
Enterprise operational intelligence can help. It’s a discipline focused on collecting, analyzing, and using real time-data to optimize an organization’s business processes and operations. This involves using key technologies like process mining, predictive analytics tools, and artificial intelligence to generate actionable insights. It also involves having strong practices to implement changes that provide key benefits to the business.
This post will give tips for maximizing your enterprise operational intelligence effectiveness and making smarter business decisions.
1. Define clear goals and KPIs
Before you can make a clear impact, you have to know where to direct your efforts. So, start by defining clear objectives to direct your enterprise operational intelligence efforts.
There are two pathways to defining clear objectives. First, you can take a reactive approach to meeting business requirements as they arise. For instance, when a specific department needs to meet a goal, you can use their goals as a guide. If the billing department wants to improve efficiency, you might start tracking the amount of time taken to approve invoices or process payments.
The second method is to be proactive. Tie your process intelligence goals to the wider business objectives and goals. Whether your organization wants to improve efficiency, reduce costs, or improve time-to-market, you can design your operational intelligence gathering efforts around metrics to support these goals.
Regardless of which approach you take (and you will likely take both), start with key business goals. Then, define your key performance indicators based on those objectives.
2. Use process intelligence tools to gather real data
Gaining meaningful insights from your data comes from having the right process intelligence technologies. These technologies help facilitate your enterprise operational intelligence and process improvement efforts.
It starts with strong process mining tools. Process mining detects how your organization operates by mining the data generated by your digital solutions. This allows you to visualize logjams in processes, see non-conformances, and identify root causes of performance issues. Because this is based on real-world data, you can make smarter decisions about how to design, automate, and optimize processes. This also allows you to measure the effects of any changes by reviewing improvements after improvements are implemented.
Second, you’ll want strong visualization tools. Customizable dashboards help you design views that can offer real-time analytics on the information an individual audience needs to make a decision or see the value of your process automation efforts. This allows everyone to derive meaningful insights from their area of focus.
Finally, don’t sleep on AI. Artificial intelligence has been implemented in platforms and software applications across industries and use cases to drive efficiency and improve user experience. For operational intelligence, AI copilots can be used to provide answers about data in natural language. With the right solutions, you can even ask generative AI to build new charts or reports so you can gain a quick visualization of the data. This helps you go beyond the existing dashboards to create custom reports on the fly.
3. Connect your tools with a wider automation platform
Enterprise operational intelligence is only one piece of the puzzle. Insight must precede action. When you find a process bottleneck, it’s critical to have the tools necessary to design, automate, and optimize your processes.
Process intelligence tools can be included in a wider process automation platform. These platforms offer critical capabilities such as automation tools like AI and robotic process automation (RPA), data fabric, process mining, and a wide range of process orchestration tools. This allows you to take the intelligence you gathered and make changes to optimize your processes.
For instance, let’s say you’re in charge of improving the customer experience team’s processes. Through process mining, you might notice that reps spend a long time trying to track down information from a knowledge base or spend too much time escalating issues. AI can play a pivotal role here. You can train an AI Copilot on your business documents such as a list of customer policies. From there the representatives can ask direct questions and receive answers instantly without having to go searching for exact matches in knowledge bases. This additional speed can lead to reduced customer wait times and, as a result, improved customer satisfaction.
4. Demonstrate ongoing value
Finally, ensure your efforts are continuously evaluated and communicated. To demonstrate this, make sure to establish consistent routines for monitoring and reporting on the performance of your optimized processes. This means checking your defined KPIs regularly. Automated reports, customized dashboards can help, but it’s also critical to set up regular progress meetings with stakeholders. Make sure to quantify your wins: If your process automation has reduced customer inquiry response times by 30%, translate that into hours saved per week.
Also, make sure to practice continuous monitoring with real-time data. If anything starts to go off the rails, you can use real-time insights to course correct before it becomes a bigger problem. This alone can help you improve your team’s standing within the wider organization.
Succeeding with enterprise operational intelligence
No matter what industry you’re in, you can benefit from enterprise operational intelligence. It’s not just about gathering intelligence and data—it’s about using those insights to drive meaningful improvements across your organization. Make sure to define clear objectives that tie back to overarching business strategies, gather data, implement improvements, and measure the effectiveness as you go. And never stop improving.
Whether you want to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, or improve time-to-market, process intelligence tools can help you make sound decisions that truly impact the bottom line. And when tied to the right platform that offers technologies like process mining, predictive analytics, AI, RPA, and process orchestration, you can quickly turn these insights into real world benefits.
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One core component of enterprise intelligence is the use of process mining tools. Find out why Appian was named a Leader in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Process Mining.
