A new report from Gartner projects that organisations could boost their profits by 20% through the deployment of predictive business performance metrics by 2017.
Predictive metrics would allow organisations to alert their workers about the occurrence of a business moment and direct them on the best next action in the context of a particular customer’s expectations.
Gartner research analyst Samantha Searle said that using historical measures to gauge business and process performance is a thing of the past.
"To prevail in challenging market conditions, businesses need predictive metrics — also known as "leading indicators" — rather than just historical metrics (aka "lagging indicators")," Searle said.
The report added that only 31% of business and IT leaders possess metrics that add to strategic key performance indicators (KPI).
About 715 of business and IT leaders had knowledge about the required KPIs to support the business strategy, while only 48% knew how to access metrics that help them understand how their work contributes to strategic KPIs, and 31% had a dashboard to offer visibility of these metrics.
"However, visible metrics won’t help drive strategic business outcomes, such as increasing profitability, if business and IT leaders don’t have the right metrics in place," Searle added.
The intelligent business process management suites (iBPMSs) are currently being employed by organisations to significantly boost their response to unpredicted business disruptions, which would further boost BPMS market by 8.8% to $2.8bn in 2014.
"Business process directors who don’t apply predictive metrics to cross-boundary business processes will leave their organisations vulnerable to the risk of failing to execute their business strategies," Searle said.
"Business process directors should identify the business processes that are critical to driving strategic business outcomes and strategy execution, and determine how best to measure business outcomes in a way that triggers human or automated actions before an undesired outcome occurs.
"This ability will be crucial in determining the organisations who survive the shift towards a digital world and those who will be left behind."
