Operational BI In The Real World

Today, March 19th, at 3PM ET, will happen a live Web broadcast presentation entitled Operational BI In The Real World, provided by Information Management (formerly DM Review), and hosted by Eric Kavanagh with Jim Ericson, in its program called DM Radio.

According Information Management: "Everyone in your company is a decision-maker at some level. That's why delivering BI-generated insights to operational employees can yield tremendous value. Of course, such insights must be accurate, timely and framed within the proper context. That's what Operational BI is all about. Tune into this episode of DM Radio to learn how your organization can achieve the long-sought BI for the Masses. We'll talk to Ventana Research Founder Mark Smith, Expressor Software CEO Bob Potter, Noetix VP of Engineering Technologies Daryl Orts, and Information Builders CMO Michael Corcoran.

Attendees will learn:
- The four pillars of Operational BI
- How to choose the right business functions to support
- Why good analytics make for great operational decisions
- Tips for leveraging existing applications and architecture
- Which messaging technologies can get the job done
- How Operational BI will help drive future application development."


In the Information Management website, you can register for this live Web broadcast.

You also can check out the DM Radio archives to hear previous programs with a variety of other issues.

The DM radio is an excellent initiative by Information Management (formerly DM Review) to spread knowledge with expert professionals in interesting subjects.

Does Your Operational BI Integrate Predictive Analytics?

David Stodder wrote a post in the Ventana's blog, called Does Your Operational BI Integrate Predictive Analytics? In the post, he commented that in the Ventana benchmark research on Operational Business Intelligence Trends, they found that a large number of organizations are deploying technology to enable better decisions and actions by front-line workers and operational managers.

He said: "Organizations should consider whether they need to supplement BI with predictive analytics: that is, statistical and data mining tools for intelligently monitoring processes and implementing predictive models to guide response to events. To manage operations, many organizations are already deploying a range of sometimes overlapping technologies, including business process management, ERP, workflow, business activity monitoring and business rules management."

He considers that analytics are most often not presented in operational BI dashboards, but the technology vendors are beginning to address this problem. He commented about the new release of TIBCO Spotfire bring together the Spotfire analytics and visualization products with the predictive analytics tools gained through its acquisition of Insightful. For him, this sort of integration is an important development; organizations should evaluate how well their vendors are integrating predictive analytics with analytics and BI to help them achieve the most optimum outcomes.

Transitioning Toward Operational Business Intelligence

This month, DM Review published a nice article entitled Transitioning Toward Operational Business Intelligence, written by Lyndsay Wise. She talks about why the concept of operational BI is becoming more realistic with the shift in the BI scenario, considering the BI expansion in the organizations and an approach to apply the concept of BI for the masses.

She considers that mass deployments and embedding BI within daily operational processes are becoming the goals of many organizations that are ready to move beyond online analytical processing (OLAP) and ad hoc reporting. Operational BI is being pushed on the market to increase the overall use of BI within the organization.

Once BI is implemented within the organization, various departments begin to see the benefits of its use. This coupled with an existing framework and general architecture creates an environment where BI can be expanded upon without initial rework. By expanding data sharing and collaborative efforts across the organization, there exists the ability to integrate BI use into existing processes and to identify where BI might fit within overall business processes in general.

With more end users accessing BI applications and BI’s extended reach toward multiple decision-makers, organizations begin to take a more forward looking approach to BI and, more importantly, to organization-wide decision-making. When looking at a BI for the masses approach, the question becomes “What is the best manner to deploy this type of expansion?” The problem with many traditional BI solutions is the inability to use them without training and some general technical knowledge, for instance understanding how different sets of information interrelate.

I think the use of operational BI in the companies is an interesting approach for spreading the use of BI throughout the organization.

Choosing BI, BAM or CEP

Intelligence Enterprise published a very nice article today, by Doug Henschen, where Gartner analyst Roy Schulte answered questions about event processing (EP).

Roy Schulte did several interesting comments:
- The event processing (EP) are coming in three varieties: low-latency BI dashboards, lower-latency Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), and ultra-low-latency complex event processing (CEP).

- The BI vendors are certainly moving toward BAM. If you put up a BI dashboard and you're refreshing it, say, every ten minutes, which you can do with any BI dashboard, then you are doing BAM with traditional BI tools. BAM is really a style of deployment rather than a distinct technology type, so I would say BAM can be done with traditional BI tools.

- When it comes to low-latency BAM, where you're trying to refresh the dashboard every few seconds, traditional BI tools aren't fast enough. That's when you need BAM products that are purpose-built to run fast.

- If you're doing something that involves a human being, you probably don't need CEP. People can't work that fast, so in those applications you may be able to use BI or BAM. When you're dealing with machine speeds, that's where CEP comes in.

- Customer experience management is a great use for CEP because you can't control it, you can't predict it, it's high volume and it's continuous.

- I'm excited about BAM — not necessarily the term "BAM," because most people don't use it, but the concept. I think this whole approach of creating dashboards and giving visibility to business people is such a big win.

I think the concepts and technologies are evolving dramatically, so you should consider carefully your need, choose the right technology, and start with the right architecture.