An interesting M&A happened almost 2 weeks ago outside of the BPM space but something which we need to be acutely aware of. Attensity, which builds business applications that make use of unstructured data, acquired Biz360 a social media monitoring company. The resulting merger, according to the press release will:
“enable corporate customers to gain strategic competitive advantage through (1) a world-class “listening post,” (2) self-service analytics, and (3) an integrated self-service application that enables users to take action on insights found across customer interaction channels; intelligently routes social, SMS and email communications for response; and brings social knowledge into corporate knowledge-bases for more effective agent service and customer self-service.
“Our acquisition of Biz360 further underscores Attensity’s commitment to open the enterprise to the world’s unstructured data, bringing a wealth of internal and external information to key business processes,” said Ian Bonner, president and CEO of Attensity Group.
The key information we need to focus on is how using social media monitoring can empower customer facing decisions internally in the enterprise. Essentially what this could mean is that BAM and BI come of age by taking real-time insight from external feeds and mixing it with internal data. So again we’re faced with the current definition of Social BPM constraining what it can really achieve and that it goes beyond discovery and management of unstructured processes. Social means open collaboration, whether internal or external.
As Ian Bonner hinted at, it’s to open the enterprise to the world’s unstructured data.
I think it’s all about creating an open enterprise full stop.
