Panel Session: BPM Is Missing the Data

Track
Business

Summary:
BPM takes an appropriate business-oriented, top-down approach to helping organizations be more efficient and agile. But did that top-down approach magically solve the traditional data or application integration problems that underlie all successful, large and (therefore) complex organizations? No. The top-down approach simply shoved the problem into another layer of the stack and pretended the problem went away. And did BPM magically fix data quality issues? No. Data quality is just as dirty as it ever has been, making the details of successful BPM initiatives more challenging to achieve.

Several years ago, data was ignored in discussions of BPM and SOA. More recently as companies get more experienced with real-world implementations, data is part of the discussion again. Having a data architecture strategy and a solid approach to data integration and quality is now seen as an important part of successful SOA initiatives.

In many ways, data drives BPM. Conversely, BPM can be used to fix aspects of the underlying data quality issues. Companies are using BPM to orchestrate their data governance initiatives and coordinate how the business and IT are working together to continually monitor and improve the quality of their information.

We will discuss how companies are dealing with data issues with respect to BPM initiatives.