Computing Uncertain Key Indicators

Key indicators, such as key performance indicators or key compliance indicators are at the heart of modern business intelligence applications. Key indicators are metrics, i.e., numbers, that help an organization to measure and assess how successful it is in reaching predefined goals (e.g., lowering process execution times or increasing compliance with regulations), and typically the people looking at them simply trust the values they see when taking decisions. However, it is important to recognize that in real business environments we cannot always rely on fully trusted or certain data, yet indicators are to be computed. In this paper, we tackle the problem of computing uncertain indicators from uncertain data, we characterize the problem in a modern business scenario (combining techniques from uncertain and probabilistic data management), and we describe how we addressed and implemented the problem in a European research project.