Again, let’s consider a content-centric business process within a business area that wants real-time business analytics. This means that the data in the business process has to be published to the analytics engine.

Hopefully, you know how the process engine implements it’s analytics and you’ll know that for process data to be published, it must firstly be within the instance data of each process and it must be recorded in a process eventlog. The data in the eventlog is processed by the analytics engine and published as OLAP cubes, ready for querying. Assuming we thought about this at the beginning of our design, either our forms or somewhere in the process we’re gathering the pieces of data that are needed for the analytics. If we haven’t gathered the data somewhere, there’s no magic that will get it into the analytics engine, and we’ll have to change our design.

The dependencies introduced in this simple example are complex, if they’re not part of the design process at the start. Assuming we didn’t think about the downstream requirements at the beginning we now have some changes to implement.

If the analytics data isn’t part of our process yet, we’ll have to change the process definition. You know that process definitions are versioned and for data to be made available on the event log it must be exposed, which means you need a new version of the process and a change to the eventlog. Integration with the forms solutions is version specific so you’ll also need a new version of the form policy to link to the new workflow version. If the form needs to display or process the data in some way, we also have to consider the versioning behaviour of the form, and ensure we update the form policy too. As workflow instances are versioned we may have holes in our exposed data where older pieces of work don’t have the data we want to expose to the analytics engine.

Our integrated platform doesn’t sound that easy any more and the upstream consequences of a simple request for some analytics at the end of the process are cumbersome.