Most organizations strive for improved efficiency because it ties directly to cost savings and better performance, while helping to anchor competitive advantages. However, improving
efficiency involves more than simply automating labor-intensive activities. It requires forward-thinking organizations to continually seek out new methods of managing increasingly complex business processes - in other words, making each process work smarter in terms of how it operates.

The next-generation BAM initiative known as process-driven business intelligence (BI) begins with a simple design notion: decision-making is a fundamental aspect of any operational business process. As such, decision-making capabilities and analytics should be embedded into the design of a process, not added after the fact or in reaction to processes that do not work efficiently. With this type of intelligent process design, the need for decision-making is anticipated as an integral part of each process, resulting in business processes that work smarter, not harder, in improving business efficiency and performance.