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Chapter 10
Tool Support

Many vendors offer Business Intelligence (BI) software products. Unfortunately,
most of these products are data-centric and focus on rather simplistic forms of anal-
ysis. As shown in the preceding chapters, process-centric, truly “intelligent” BI is
possible due to advances in process mining. For example, ProM is an open-source
process mining tool supporting all of the techniques mentioned in this book. Pro-
cess discovery, conformance checking, social network analysis, organizational min-
ing, decision mining, history-based prediction and recommendation, etc. are all sup-
ported by ProM. Recently, several software vendors started adding process mining
capabilities to their products. This chapter provides an overview of the market for BI
products. Moreover, ProM and other tools supporting process mining are described
in more detail.

10.1 Business Intelligence?
Forrester defines Business Intelligence (BI) in two ways. The broad definition pro-
vided by Forrester is “BI is a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and
technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information used
to enable more effective strategic, tactical, and operational insights and decision-
making” [40]. Forrester also provides a second, more narrow, definition: “BI is a set
of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that leverage the output
of information management processes for analysis, reporting, performance manage-
ment, and information delivery” [40]. As indicated in Sect. 1.6, many overlapping
terms are used when describing BI technologies, e.g., Business Activity Monitoring
(BAM), Corporate Performance Management (CPM), and Business Process Intel-
ligence (BPI). Clear definitions of these terms are missing. It seems that some BI
vendors are deliberately using confusing terminology to verbally distinguish them-
selves from their competitors and to suggest more functionality than actually imple-
mented. Nevertheless, the market for BI products is steadily growing and maturing.
Some of the most widely used BI products are [41]: IBM Cognos Business Intelli-
gence (IBM), Oracle Business Intelligence (Oracle), SAP BusinessObjects (SAP),
WebFOCUS (Information Builders), MS SQL Server (Microsoft), MicroStrategy
W.M.P. van der Aalst, Process Mining, 261
DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-19345-3_10, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011