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 digital F&A technology solutions and managed services supplied by a third-party service provider. F&A BPO services provide transformation expertise and technology solutions that meet finance departments’ requirement to move from labor-intensive service delivery models to automation-intensive models supporting the digital transformation of finance operations. F&A BPO providers offer processing services and technology solutions for purchase to pay (P2P), order to cash (O2C) and record to report (R2R). BPO providers meet finance buyers’ needs to address improving process maturity at a competitive price. Providers offer processing and technology services to improve P2P, O2C and R2R processes, which offer buyers the ability to purchase transformation expertise and technology solutions to help their finance operations mature. At minimum, an F&A BPO provider processes finance activities on behalf of its customers via a delivery center network, often in low-cost locations, passing on cost savings in the form of labor arbitrage. Mature BPO offerings move beyond labor arbitrage efforts and offer buyers end-to-end intelligent processing capabilities through either proprietary or partner technology ecosystems, which are often cloud-based and are focused on reducing human dependencies in process workflows. Buyers benefit from these types of agreements by maturing their processes and adopting technologies that require minimum human intervention.
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.