Making Big Data Useful with BPM

The growth of big data continues to accelerate. In fact, some analysts expect the amount of digital information to explode to 2.7 trillion gigabytes in 2012. It is clear that businesses have become inundated with so much information that it's hard to make sense of all of it. Business intelligence and advanced analytics promised a solution that would make it easier for businesses to parse the data and present the most salient data points from company databases.

Does this mean we've come closer to knowing how to use this data? Not necessarily. Simply having access to data and pretty graphs doesn't mean that the business is now more competitive. What enterprises need is a process that helps activate the data in an intuitive and easy way.

Enter business process management (BPM) solutions, which make a process explicit and draws or represents it in a model -- a flow chart, for example. In the field of BPM, there are standards with specific symbols used to model business processes, including ways to distinguish between steps, tasks, or activities performed by people and those that are automated.

Let's take a look at how BPM can help activate the data accumulated from a Web analytics solution.

At their core, Web analytics tools measure, collect, analyze, and report on Internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage. In addition to being used as a tool for measuring Web traffic, Web analytics can also be used for business and market research and to assess and improve the effectiveness of a Web site. Web analytics applications can help companies measure the results of traditional print advertising campaigns. For example, by helping to estimate how traffic to a Web site changes after the launch of a new advertising campaign. Web analytics can also provide information about the number of visitors to a Web site, the number of page views. It can also be useful in market research by gauging traffic and popularity trends online.

The rise in Web analytics use has partly been driven by the consumerization of IT. With the advent of Facebook and LinkedIn and their massive treasure trove of useful consumer and business data, companies realized that this valuable user data and relationships could be mined by implementing Web analytics solutions.

Process improvement is based on the idea that in order to improve something, first one needs to understand the current situation, then look at where and how the process might be improved -- streamlined, performed more quickly, automated, and so on. Continuous improvement, total quality management, Six Sigma, Lean, Kaizen -- all use some type of process definition, analysis, change, and evaluation of results with the ultimate goals of both reducing costs and increasing quality.