Incorporating real-time analytics and "extreme collaboration" tools into business processes will help organisations achieve what Gartner has dubbed "intelligent business operations", the analyst firm said today.
Gartner predicts that by 2016, 70% of the "most profitable" companies will have achieved IBO.
"Virtually every business operation" has one or more area where real-time analytics could be used to provide "situational awareness" for operational staff, the analyst company said.
It gave the examples of fleet management in logistics or prescription management in healthcare.
Jim Sinur, research vice president at Gartner, said that integrating real-time analytics into business operations immediately impacts the performance of the organisation. "The most dramatic change is the increased visibility in how the company is running and what is happening in its external environment," he said. "Individual contributors and managers have more situational awareness, so they are able to make better decisions faster."
"An example is work routing based on incoming arrival rates, where the knowledge required and skills needed are dynamically matched against resources available in-house, with dynamic expansion to non-employee resources as needed," Sinur said.
IBO also incorporates human collaboration, allowing workers to respond to situations as they are identified through analytics. "If the situation dictates, knowledge workers can collaborate in and around the process, case or instance to decide on and effect change," said Sinur.
In all, IBO will lead to "better and faster decision making and superior customer service, revenue growth, cost reduction and risk avoidance," Gartner said.
Gartner said IBO will incorporate a number of different technologies including event processing, business rules management, analytics, social collaboration, dynamic processes and data visualisation.
Last week, business applications vendor SAP announced its intention to acquire SmartOps, whose software applies probability modelling to supply chain optimisation.
