This article is part of APAC CIOoutlook Innovation Insights series featuring expert contributions nominated by our subscribers and reviewed by our editorial team.
What does “business visualization” actually mean?
In general, business visualization often refers to visualizing business data using BI tools. However, advances in IT have made it possible to visualize businesses from many different perspectives. From our experience, we see these different approaches to business visualization as complementary, with each addressing a different aspect of how a business operates.
Here, we organize the different types of business visualization according to the type of solution and how each approach helps companies visualize and understand their businesses from different perspectives:
1. Business Intelligence (BI): Visualize and analyze business data
BI allows us to visualize and analyze various types of business data, including sales, profit, costs, inventory and production volume. By visualizing and analyzing this data, we can support strategic decision-making and better planning for sales, manufacturing and other business activities. Accumulated business data can be viewed using graphs and charts from different perspectives, such as time, product and region. BI is already widely used by many companies, helping them develop optimal plans based on sales and manufacturing performance.
2. Business Process Management (BPM): Visualize and optimize business processes
When it comes to improving operational efficiency, BPM gives us a way to visualize and optimize business processes such as sales management, production management, financial accounting and inventory management. We represent these processes as process models to clarify the flow of activities and the relationships between processes.
Based on these models, processes can be redesigned and unnecessary activities can be eliminated to improve the efficiency of the business process as a whole. BPM initially focused on modeling business processes using process modeling tools, but it has evolved to include functions for process execution and monitoring.
3. Business Activity Monitoring (BAM): Monitor business performance-
The next aspect is BAM, which focuses on monitoring business performance through Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) related to business activities, such as the number of transactions processed, processing time and error rate. Relevant KPIs are collected from information systems and continuously monitored to determine whether they are within appropriate ranges. When an abnormal condition is detected, the system can send an alert or notification. We often use BAM together with BI and BPM, allowing changes in business performance to be monitored alongside the underlying business data and processes.
Business visualization is evolving from understanding business data and processes to detecting business events, identifying what is affected and taking appropriate action.
4. Business Event Management (BEM): Detect and manage business events and issues-
Our thinking goes a step further with BEM, which focuses on detecting and managing business events, including issues and problems and the subjects affected by them. The purpose is to detect and notify users of business events and the subjects affected by them, provide appropriate actions to address them and manage those actions until the event is resolved. We detect business events and their related subjects using data collected from information systems and other sources, then visualize the events and subjects using maps and other visualization methods. The system presents appropriate actions and tracks their progress and status until the event is resolved. BEM can be added to an existing application or implemented as an independent application.
Relationship between BI, BPM, BAM and BEM
Through our experience with these solutions, we see that they are not mutually exclusive. They can be combined to increase their effectiveness.
BI, in particular, provides the foundation for visualizing data, which is also important for the other solutions. For example, in BPM, the changes in process performance can be visualized and analyzed over time. Similarly, in BAM, changes in KPIs can be visualized and analyzed. This makes it possible to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of these solutions.
BEM as an Evolution of BPM and BAM
Based on our experience with BPM and BAM, we see BEM as an evolution of these approaches, built on the concept of visualizing the subjects affected by business events.
For example, an event can be detected when a KPI reaches an abnormal value. Actions can then be suggested and carried out to resolve the event. The process of carrying out these actions is similar to a BPM process model.
However, BPM generally focuses on predefined and standardized business processes. In contrast, BEM can use dynamic action models, allowing it to respond to constantly changing business situations. We see this ability to adapt to dynamic and changing business conditions as one of the key characteristics of BEM.
BEM provides an ideal framework for applying generative AI to business visualization, enabling AI to anticipate and detect business events, identify the subjects affected and recommend the most appropriate actions to resolve them.
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The articles from these contributors are based on their personal expertise and viewpoints, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of their employers or affiliated organizations.
