That was the message in New York Wednesday from several enterprise users at IDC's Business Intelligence and Business Process Forum who have launched projects to infuse business processes with analytics to allow front-line workers to use exception handling to make decisions.

At Capital One Financial Corp., for example, these intelligent process or operational BI automation projects have been focused on high-level corporate strategy areas such as lean operating initiatives and outsourcing, said David Hummelberg, managing vice president of IT at the McLean, Va.-based company.

"With BI, the net result of the value proposition is pretty foggy going into it," he said. "That is why ours have been drafted behind a specific business issue."

While the company has outsourced the majority of its call centers, it uses intelligent process automation to route calls to between 10,000 and 15,000 call center representatives based on capacity and volume, Hummelberg said. As a result, it has trimmed the operational costs of its centers by 12 percent year over year for the past several years while boosting customer satisfaction, he said.

The company has also placed a call center application on worker desktops that uses analytics to lead them through cross-selling opportunities based on the demographics and previous buying patterns of callers, he said.