Analytics and business intelligence platforms — enabled by IT and augmented by AI — empower users to model, analyze and share data. Analytics and business intelligence (ABI) platforms enable organizations to understand their data. For example, what are the dimensions of their data — such as product, customer, time, and geography? People need to be able to ask questions about their data (e.g., which customers are likely to churn? Which salespeople are not reaching their quotas?). They need to be able to create measures from their data, such as on-time delivery, accidents in the workplace and customer or employee satisfaction. Organizations need to blend modeled and nonmodeled data to create new data pipelines that can be explored to find anomalies and other insights. ABI platforms make all of this possible.
Gartner defines the market for data and analytics (D&A) services as consulting and system integration (C&SI) and managed services. These services manage data for all uses (operational and analytical), and analyze data to drive business processes and improve business outcomes through more effective decision making. The core capabilities for vendor solutions in the D&A services market include: D&A strategy and operating model design Data management Analytics and business intelligence (ABI) Data science and machine learning D&A governance Program management Enterprise metadata
Gartner defines finance and accounting (F&A) business process outsourcing (BPO) as the use of third-party outsourcing service providers to handle transactional finance processes such as purchase-to-pay, order-to-cash and record-to-report. BPO service providers remotely connect to clients’ systems to carry out these operations. BPO service providers can also offer proprietary or partnered process automation solutions to enhance transactional processing efficiency. F&A BPO services are typically delivered from global delivery centers.
Gartner defines robotic process automation (RPA) as the software to automate tasks within business and IT processes via software scripts that emulate human interaction with the application UI. RPA enables a manual task to be recorded or programmed into a software script, which users can develop by programming, or by using the RPA platform’s low-code and no-code GUIs. This script can then be deployed and executed into different runtimes. The runtime executable of the deployed script is referred to as a bot, or robot. RPA is used across numerous business functions for tactical task automation. Business and IT users can leverage RPA to: Move data in or out of application systems without human interaction (unattended automation). Scripts are designed to replicate the actions of a human interacting with those systems or documents, which usually do not have available APIs. The goal is to automate and complete a task successfully without human intervention. Typically, unattended automation is triggered by a system and bots executed on a server. Automate tasks with a human in the loop (attended automation). RPA can extract information from systems and related documents, shaping it and preparing it for consumption by a human at the point of need. Typically, attended automation is triggered by a human and bots executed on a local device.