Getting 'Real Time' Performance with Operational BI

Operational business intelligence is about delivering information to people when and how they need it in the context of business need. Explore the five best practices best-in-class companies are using to drive faster, better decision making and higher customer satisfaction.


I read a post on the Intelligent enterprise website about getting real time performance from your business intelligence infrastructure.

A number of companies have started to use existing data to provide daily, even minute by minute information. Traditional business intelligence solutions continue to address the strategic information needs of decision makers with analysis of historical data. A number of companies are now realising the potential of applying Business Intelligence to more immediate operational needs. A number of vendors included Business Objects and Micrsoft providing support for the day to day operational needs of a company.



David Hatch from Intelligent enterprise says key benefits to business users include the opportunity to:

• Manage business activities as they occur, as opposed to waiting for the end of a day, week, or month before gaining access to analytical data and information;



• Improve customer relations by responding to their needs more rapidly, and heading off harmful events before the customer is aware, or possibly before they happen;



• Increase business efficiency by providing actionable information to line-level knowledge workers in real-time, and automating manual processes to reduce costly, repetitive report creation tasks.
  

THE 'FLAVORS' OF OPERATIONAL BI

The term "operational BI" has been identified with several terms within various industry and market vernaculars, including "transactional BI, real-time analytics, near-real-time analytics, operational reporting, business activity monitoring" and "decision management." Some of the terms have been coined to differentiate between the timeframes within which data collection, reporting, and analysis occur. Other terms describe differences in the methods and calculations that take place as data is captured, manipulated, and delivered.

Whether your company has a business intelligence environment or thinking about youre requirements - everyone can benefit from Operational Business Intelligence!

Click here for more information about Operational Business Intelligence.

Megatrends of Business Intelligence

Complacency ... Enterprises seeking a competitive edge are looking toward competency centers, MDM, real-time deployments, data virtualization, workload management and operational intelligence. We help you answer six questions that will lead to innovative new BI strategies.

We came across this post that summarised changes and predictions in the BI market by intelligent enterprise.

Just when everyone thought there was general agreement on what business intelligence (BI) is "methods, tools and systems for manipulating quantitative data to build views and perform analysis for decision-making" the industry changes so much that we may again have competing definitions.

As the New Year unfolds, it would be easy to reduce what happened to the BI industry in 2007 to one colossal megatrend: consolidation. Oracle bought Hyperion Software. SAP acquired Business Objects (and a few others). And Cognos, which itself acquired Celequest in late 2006 and Applix in 2007, is in the process of being snapped up by IBM. To be sure, several important BI tool and platform players are still independent, including Actuate, Datawatch, Information Builders, MicroStrategy, Panorama and SAS. Also unchanging is the growing presence of Microsoft, not to mention that of open source BI, the domain of Pentaho and Jaspersoft. Performance management and specialized data- and text-analytics vendors still abound. Nonetheless, it feels like the industry as a whole has turned in a new direction and will never again resemble its pre-2007 self.

Could there be more consolidation in 2008? Entirely possible: If nothing else, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP are now markets unto themselves and will undoubtedly stay on the hunt to acquire software products and services that fill holes and create competitive advantages. This article explores how the consolidation trend might play out, but more importantly it presents six important megatrends in the context of questions organizations and BI practitioners must answer as they evaluate software and work to deliver on key strategies with BI.

Click here for the complete article.

Operational BI: Getting the whole company using Business Intelligence

The major vendors are all making conversations about Operational BI or Pervasive BI.

Companies are trying to raise the competitive bar through improvement of many operational business processes, including customer experiences, inventory
and purchasing, systems monitoring, and business process optimisation. Organizations are attempting to increase customer loyalty, profitability, and cross-sell / upsell opportunities.

Many companies are now being pushed to deliver results despite budget constraints. This has resulted in a focus on cost and business process efficiency monitoring that will help find efficiencies and improve the bottom line.

While traditional business intelligence solutions continue to address the strategic information needs of decision makers with analysis of historical data, organizations
are starting to realize the potential of applying BI technology and approaches to more immediate information needs. The study will determine what companies are
doing to:
• Target and prioritize operational BI initiatives
• Improve customer relations, response, and performance
• Address non-customer facing operational process improvements
• Increase the availability of information for both customer-facing and other line-level knowledge
workers
• Monitor systems for opportunities to improve business performance and reduction of harmful events

The dmReview talk about "The Next Generation of Business Intelligence: Operational BI". They say ...

Operational reporting applications simply format and display the content of BTx data stores. Many business users, however, want to be able to analyze BTx data to identify potential problems and look for business trends. There are a wide variety of analysis tools available on the market. The capabilities provided by these products range from using Microsoft Excel for data analysis to advanced OLAP applications and database systems.

Operational Business Intelligence has also been labelled BI 3.0 or the next evolution of business intelligence. We recently implemented a BI solution for a client that included strategic aswell as operational Business Intelligence.

Making Business Intelligence for the masses !

I saw this video a while ago but found it on YouTube recently ...

This is Business Objects Performance Enlightenment video - let there be light.



"We are not a business intelligence company ... we are in the business of helping companies become more intelligent!"

Benefits of Strategic Data Analysis

Benefits of Strategic Data Analysis

It is very obvious that analysing your data can provide strategic benfits. But I am often asked how can I do it easily. There are a number of reasons to undertake strategic data analysis including:

economic pressures, just-in-time supply chain management, a more diverse and demanding customer base and government requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX).

Business Intelligence (BI) tools bring information and insights to your business previously unknown and this is occurring in many other large and mid-sized organisations around the world.

Strategic data analysis benefits an organisation in many ways including:

• Providing access to statistical and other reporting tools that expose the hidden data that is driving change and growth in an organisation but is rarely measured.
  
• Providing a single point of view into diverse data through the implementation of data mining and data farming techniques.
  
• Identifying non-traditional value measurements that are often overlooked.
  
• Creating the ability to acquire pertinent data needed to make quality decisions based upon actual business trends and conditions.
  
• Providing a way to link strategic enterprise data to current and planned business activities.
  
• Providing access to competitive intelligence in order to create a competitive advantage.
  
• Tracking and measuring Key Performance Indicators.
  

Effective decision support systems depend upon management’s ability to understand an organisation’s underlying data. Key business activities including sales and marketing activities, financial and human resources management and planning, and the activities of other departments are improved when key decision makers have access to the tools necessary to perform strategic data analysis. ools to the forefront of many large and mid-sized organisations around the world.

The gap between the ability to link business performance with strategic data is being bridged by the technology delivered by Business Intelligence (BI) tool providers such as Microsoft, Oracle and Business Objects.

Recognising that different businesses have different BI needs, Microsoft offers a suite of BI tools that scale to fit the needs of both technical and non-technical users in small, mid-size and large organisations. These tools are fully compatible with its own line of database products as well as those provided by SAP and other manufacturers. ools to the forefront of many large and mid-sized organisations around the world.

Viewed more as a BI and strategic data analysis tool provider for mid-sized and large organisations, Oracle offers business intelligence and data warehousing tools including a suite of ETL, OLAP, and Data Mining software products.

Business Objects is also a key player in the strategic data analysis and BI market with their suite of tools that supports major manufacturers including Siebel, Teradata, SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle and Informatica.

The journey to improving business performance begins with the organisations commitment to performing strategic data analysis and employing BI solutions from the industry’s leading suppliers of quality BI and strategic data analysis tools.

The benefits of Business Intelligence

The Benefits of Business Intelligence

I am often asked what can Business Intelligence do for my business. So my response is usually ...

Business Intelligence (BI) is both a management process as well as a collection of software applications and underlying technology that enables organisations to make better business decisions by exposing key metrics that drive the organisation

.

Business Intelligence is sometimes confused with Competitive Intelligence but they are not the same concepts. This is true even though BI technology does give management a methodology for getting a better grasp on the internal and external forces that are driving their organisation as well as a way to measure their organisation’s performance against the performance of their competitors.

Properly used, BI systems assist management in developing a data-based decision making model that provides more consistent results when compared to non-BI methods. Organisations that have successfully implemented BI systems have better and timelier access to customer activities, marketplace trends, supply chain issues and a host of other key performance indicators (KPIs) that are not able to be easily measured in a non-BI environment.


The Technology Behind The Business Intelligence Process

All of the data that BI systems access comes from the organisation’s data warehouse which is a specially-designed database that stores integrated data from various sources from within the organisation.

Business intelligence analysts perform data mining, which is the process of analyzing the data in the data warehouse to uncover patterns and relationships, using specialised BI tools such as Microsoft BI, Oracle BI and Business Objects BI.

Because BI needs vary among business sectors, many BI tools are highly industry-specific. Even so, most BI tools provide a similar core suite of capabilities which include executive reporting tools and a management dashboard that aggregates data and provides a high-level view of the organisation from a BI perspective.

Many organisations employ BI strategies in order to support the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) success measurement program. Unlike traditional measurements which are solely financial-based, the BSC approach measures both the financial lagging indicators as well as well as a variety of future performance indicators which are called leading measures. The BSC approach works so well because it not only provides a means for analyzing financial indicators, it also provides a way to quantify an organisation's other value drivers including its learning and growth perspective, business process perspective and its customer perspective.

Companies such as Exxon/Mobile and Cigna Insurance credit their profitability and explosive growth to implementing a BI/BSC strategy that enabled them to precisely gauge their market opportunities and position their companies to become financial and performance leaders in their market niches.

Business Intelligence is a process that works for any size organisation that is dedicated to gaining a competitive edge and raise their visibility in a crowded marketplace.