Business process observability: An IT solution to a business challenge

Business processes play a critical role in digital transformation, enabling organizations to operate more efficiently, adapt faster to changes, and deliver better customer value. Yet most business processes remain unmonitored, or at least under-monitored. How can IT teams close this visibility gap?

Business processes support virtually all aspects of an organization’s operations. They’re often categorized by their function; core processes directly create customer value, support processes increase departmental efficiency, and management processes drive strategic goals and compliance. Sometimes overlooked is a fourth category we might call “long-tail processes;” these are the ad hoc or custom workflows that develop in response to gaps between systems, applications, departments, or workflows. Regardless of their role, every business process is designed to improve business outcomes.

Most organizations have hundreds of business processes across these four categories, supported by IT systems through a mix of on-premises, cloud, and SaaS solutions. Business processes are valuable assets, and the lack of visibility is alarming, representing both risk and opportunity.

The whole is other than the sum of its parts

Processes are typically quite complex, involving multiple disparate systems, external interfaces, and human interactions. Despite the deep IT observability you may have deployed, you still can’t infer process health from system status; problems occur even when the underlying infrastructure is healthy. Many of your business processes likely encounter failures, intermittent delays, or ongoing inefficiencies, yet your observability solution likely remains oblivious to these issues.

Given the business-critical nature of many of these processes, it’s clear that the risk from unobserved processes is substantial, tangible, and an unfortunate shared experience.

Is business process management the answer?

Cost and complexity are two primary factors that limit the adoption of business process management and mining solutions. License fees are only the tip of the cost iceberg; it’s not uncommon for a process mining implementation to take many months and cost over $100K per process. Complex data integrations require significant skilled work and coordination from multiple teams and require ongoing maintenance. These factors often limit deployment to a few mission-critical processes, usually managed by a business process management (BPM) center of excellence. This centralized approach can compel organizations to prioritize process monitoring and optimization initiatives to just a few mission-critical processes while neglecting those with less obvious—though significant—impact on business outcomes.

At its best, business process management embraces collaboration between business teams responsible for optimizing business outcomes and IT teams responsible for system observability. But even the best BPM solutions lack the IT context to support actionable process analytics; this is the opportunity for observability platforms.

Enter business process observability

Business process observability determines process health and performance through data gathered at each step, leveraging appropriate levels of system monitoring or interfaces. Log files and APIs are the most common business data sources, and software agents may offer a simpler no-code option.

• Transaction data (such as purchase confirmations, loan approvals, or service requests) is used to calculate inter-step timings and capture the step’s outcome (for example, success, failure, or conditional branch).
• Transaction metadata (such as a product SKU, loan amount, or service address) enriches process insights and increases analytic granularity.
• Transaction context (such as the responsible host, service, or system process) connects each step to its supporting IT infrastructure for troubleshooting and optimization.
• Correlation IDs (such as a transaction ID, customer number, or order number) are used to reassemble discrete transactions into a sequenced end-to-end flow to support detailed process analytics.
• Process health is determined through calculated metrics and process-specific KPIs such as throughput, revenue, cycle time, and exception rate.

To summarize, business process observability:

• Treats the process as a business asset or entity with unique discernable flows.
• Determines process health via data collected at each step, reported as process-specific business KPIs.
• Includes end-to-end and step-specific details for every process instance.

Process observability benefits include enhanced operational efficiency, reduced costs, increased productivity, compliance visibility, and improved customer satisfaction. These benefits come from robust process analytics, often augmented by AI. They’re initially realized reactively and, as organizations mature, proactively, in two key categories:

• Remediation: When process KPIs degrade, process analytics uncover the root cause to inform or automate service recovery.
• Optimization: Whether an ad-hoc initiative or a continuous improvement function, process analytics provide the data-driven foundation for process optimization.

The Dynatrace advantage

Few observability platforms offer business process observability. At best, they group metrics from isolated process steps into a linear process-like view, ignoring the complexity of real-world process flows and lacking end-to-end flow details to support effective analytics and optimization.

Dynatrace treats your business processes as true business assets, connecting business KPIs with end-to-end process analytics to meet the collaboration and optimization needs of business and IT teams. Dynatrace makes it easy to get started and cost-effective to implement broadly.

Dynatrace business process observability leverages key platform capabilities, including:

Business events, which provide easy access to business data, are automatically enriched with IT context. Business events can come from:

• OneAgent – a unique capability offering configurable no-code access to in-flight application payload.
• Log files – using OpenPipeline to extract and transform business data while reducing log management and storage overhead.
• API – to ingest data from relevant business systems.
• RUM – for high-precision user journey analytics.

Business Flow is a Dynatrace® App that simplifies business process configuration, reporting, and analytics.

• Easy configuration of process flows
• Automatic KPI reporting
• Granular flow details

Simplified access to business data coupled with a purpose-built app makes it easy to get started with business process observability. It’s not uncommon for Dynatrace customers to implement Business Flow in just a few weeks, often without any development effort, with only incremental subscription costs. To learn first-hand about some of their successes, check out a few of these Business Analytics customer breakouts from our recent Perform user conference. You can also try it yourself in our Dynatrace Playground (registration is required).

Wherever you might be on your transformation journey, business processes form the framework that drives better business outcomes. This is an opportune time to expand the value IT delivers to your business teams.