By Dan Berthiaume
While there is substantial interest in the value analytics can provide in informing business processes and functions, the actual application of analytics significantly lags interest levels. Two poll questions asked of attendees at a recent Big Data webinar demonstrate that when it comes to BPO, analytics is still in growth phase.
How Big Data interacts with BPO, and how BPO can aid organizations in more effectively collecting, analyzing and managing Big Data to produce superior business process outcomes, was the topic of a webinar, “Analyze This: Your Business Process Analytics Strategy May Be Hurting your Business,” hosted by BPO Outcomes on July 24, 2012. The webinar included presentations from Terence Sandiford, Solutions Director, BPO Analytics of BPO provider Capgemini and Ben Trowbridge, Founder/CEO of advisory firm Alsbridge.
Interest Trumps Participation
In response to the first live online poll question, “To what extent are you currently using analytics to inform business processes and functions?”, 15% of respondents said they are not using business process analytics and don’t plan to at this time. Another 25% said they are interested, but have yet to start using analytics for business processes. Adding in the 25% of respondents who are the process of implementing analytics for one or more business processes, and about two-thirds of organizations have not actually deployed business process analytics, despite a high 85% interest level.
Only 15% of respondents reported being fully operational, with another 20% saying they are currently applying analytics to business processes, but limited in scope.
Analytics More Popular for Operational Processes
Response rates to the second live online poll question, “For which processes are you currently applying business analytics?”, showed that organizations are using analytics to help better perform operational processes far more frequently than to help financial processes. Thirteen percent of respondents said they are not using business analytics, mirroring this response rate to the first question. About 22% of respondents are applying business analytics to their customer care processes, the highest response rate for any of the processes listed as options. Compliance and controls followed with a 17% response rate, and 13% of respondents are applying business analytics to supply chain processes.
However, financial processes such as procure to pay and quote to deliver (9% each) and bill to cash (4%) had much lower response rates. Sandiford commented this reflects the relative lack of maturity of business analytics in the BPO space, with higher usage levels for financial processes likely as analytics becomes more common. Only about 2% of respondents apply analytics to social media processes, which probably indicates the lack of maturity of social media processes in most organizations as well as the lack of maturity of business process analytics.
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