Transportation logistics provider Transplace, also a midmarket-size company, has similarly adopted the staged-data approach, notes CTO Vincent Biddlecombe—but with a twist. Because Transplace has developed most of its transaction systems in-house, it can bring some of the business rules underpinning the analytics as close as possible to transactions themselves. "We can tell someone, 'Stop! You're about to do something suboptimal here,'" he says. (The person retains the decision-making authority, since sometimes there's a good reason to make a suboptimal process decision, Biddlecombe notes.)

Transplace IT accomplishes this by tweaking the applications to update the data warehouse more frequently and trigger the analytics using Microsoft's BI tools as part of certain transactions—not as a separate process for IT to manage. "We're trying to blur the distinction between the transaction system and the BI system," Biddlecombe says. The staged-data approach does require some tweaking to the traditional reporting and analysis tools and to the data, says Freescale's Coursen. Most notably, data needs to have an "as of" date because it's no longer all updated at the same time. Some analyses require several pieces of data be updated at the same time, so the data staging has to take that into account. At Sallie Mae, Hayes took a different approach to achieving a common analysis target. She applied complex event processing technology from Coral8 to the Web-based transaction systems that customers use to manage their loan applications.

This let her staff analyze processes in real time based on the user's clickstream data, regardless of which loan application or back-end transactional system was processing the loans. (A loan process can touch as many as 13 applications, she notes, and Sallie Mae processes about 20,000 loan applications each day, each of which involves multiple business processes.)

The same technology helps detect fraud in real time, such as by comparing a user's IP address against the location stated in the online application form.

The limitation of Hayes's approach: It relies on Web clickstream data, which exposes the current transactions' state and associated data so they can be intercepted in real time. Hayes hopes that such capabilities will be more available directly via enterprise service buses or other process-coordination systems as service-oriented architecture (SOA) becomes more widely adopted.