Process data store: A real-time data store for monitoring business processes

Abstract

With access to real-time information on critical performance indicators of business processes, managers and staff members can play a crucial role in improving the speed and effectiveness of an organization's business operations. While the investments in data warehouse technologies have resulted in considerable information processing efficiencies for the organizations, there is still a significant delay in the time required for mission critical information to be delivered in a form that is usable to managers and staff. In this paper we introduce an architecture for business process monitoring based on a process data store which is a data foundation for operational and tactical decision-making by providing real-time access to critical process performance indicators to improve the speed and effectiveness of workflows. The process data store allows to identify and react to exceptions or unusual events that happened in workflows by sending out notifications or by directly changing the current state of the workflow. Our proposed architecture allows to transform and integrate workflow events with minimal latency providing the data context against which the event data is used or analyzed. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.