Operational BI: next generation of business intelligence
Traditional business intelligence (BI) has time and again proved its usefulness as a tool for providing information around strategic planning and high-level decision-making.
However, there is an increasing need for BI to be extended across the wider enterprise to incorporate operational data and allow for accurate operational decision-making.
Most organisations now employ some form of BI, and this is no longer a source of significant competitive advantage. However, operational BI is emerging as a tool to once again create a real competitive edge for organisations, empowering executives, line managers and other business professionals across the enterprise by leveraging the power of information at the operations level.
By utilising operational data as part of the BI arsenal, organisations are able to gain insight into near real-time data about key performance parameters that affect order volumes, inventory levels, employee productivity etc, thus allowing for more effective decision-making.
However, while the advantages of operational BI may be numerous and clear, proper implementation of such a solution is complex and poses many challenges to the organisation.
In order to harness BI on an operational level it is necessary to have direct input into production and operations databases, but the very act of querying these databases has an impact on the information contained in the databases themselves. It is vital to have an audit trail of information coming in and going out, but this can impact the database as well as processing time.
It is also not possible to query databases while users are conducting transactions on them. Yet, for this data to be useful, operational BI needs to be conducted during business hours so information is current and up to date. On top of this, for operational BI to be effective, data needs to be updated far more frequently than is necessary for traditional BI. This information needs to be as up to date and as current as possible if it is to be of any use. These challenges pose something of a conundrum.
One way to get around this problem is to set up incremental updates, which simply extract and report on data that has changed since the last report, only moving across data that has changed and automatically creating an audit trail. This ensures that updates are received as things change, while also ensuring only relevant data is processed so that querying does not take up too much processing time or affect users on the database.
Another challenge is the need to draw data from a wider range of sources than traditional BI, which makes the need for the coveted "single view" of the organisation even more vital to avoid duplication and wasted processing time.
The ideal scenario is to achieve quick querying and reporting with the lowest possible impact on production servers. Being creative in how data is extracted from production servers can go a long way towards assisting with this, as can being very specific with the information that is pulled to reduce wasted time on unnecessary information.
Unfortunately, no matter how clever an organisation gets with incremental updates and the like, the reality is that an investment in technology is needed, such as bigger servers to cater for ever growing volumes of data and queries, as well as faster processing equipment. The expectation is for instant reports and fast response times, and if the system does not deliver this then people will not use the system.
Another aspect towards creating and implementing successful operational BI is to conduct proper business analysis. The traditional gap between business and IT needs to be closed for such an initiative, as IT needs to work closely with business to understand and identify data and business requirements.
Business also needs to align with IT to understand and realise the benefits of this to the organisation and any sort of technological implementation.
One of the benefits of utilising operational data in business intelligence processes includes improved decision-making time, as critical decisions can be made based on facts on the fly, as changes happen, enabling organisations to take advantage of fast-changing markets.
Operational BI can also help frontline workers and operational managers access relevant information more quickly, improving efficiency. Operational BI can also reduce costs, improve proactive decision-making and provide significant competitive advantage.
Business intelligence has long been cited for the benefits it can deliver to organisations, and this next-generation BI, dealing with operational data, is no different. Like any new technology it requires capital investment, but in the long-term the benefits far outweigh the expenditure, and can help to move business forward into the era of real-time decision-making ability.
http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=35474:operational-bi-next-generation-of-business-intelligence&catid=69&Itemid=58
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