Business Process Optimization

Recently, we have seen increasing adoption of business process automation technologies (and emerging standards for business process orchestration) by enterprises, as a means of improving the efficiency and quality of their internal operations, as well as their interactions with other enterprises and customers as they engage in e-business transactions. The next phase of evolution is the rise of the intelligent enterprise, which is characterized by being able to adapt its business processes quickly to changes in its operating environment. The intelligent enterprise monitors its business processes and the surrounding environment, mines the data it collects about the processes to understand how it is meeting its business objectives, and it acts to control and optimize its operations to meet those business objectives. Decisions are made quickly and accurately to modify business processes on the fly, dynamically allocate resources, prioritize work, or select the best service providers. This talk will describe challenges in managing and optimizing the business processes of an intelligent enterprise. We will describe technology approaches that we are pursuing at HP Labs., the progress we have made, and some open research questions.