The Importance of Process Thinking in Business Intelligence

The growing field of Operational Business Intelligence (BI) has resulted in increasing interest in BIsupported Business Processes (BPs), including their management and ongoing improvement. This has led BI practitioners to consider another field–Business Process Management (BPM)–that is closely related to business performance management. However, current approaches to the BPM and operational BI integration have been limited and reduced to the problem of technical integration of BPM and BI systems. This paper argues that by adopting processthinking in BI, further opportunities for business value creation could be discovered through systematic analysis of the non-technical aspects of BI and BPM integration, including strategy alignment, human-centered knowledge management, and ongoing improvement of BI supported processes. The authors propose a theoretical framework founded in the related research in BPM, BI, and Knowledge Management (KM) fields, describing the ways it has been used to guide ongoing empirical research in diverse case organizations across different industry sectors. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-0279-3.ch006