Beyond B to Real.docVIP

Beyond BI to Real-Time Operational Intelligence Dale Skeen Many companies were caught flat-footed by the rapidly changing business environment of 2008, demonstrating the limitations of the investments they had made in BI and business process management (BPM) systems. With increasing globalization and linkage between disparate markets, never has there been a greater need for real-time visibility into enterprise operations and insight into the business climate as well as the ability to take action immediately. This ability to monitor and optimize daily business activities in real time is the cornerstone of true operational intelligence (OI). Fluctuations in global supply and demand (oil, for example), customer needs (such as credit) and other variables are difficult to predict and, as demonstrated in 2008, can overtake business plans with breathtaking speed. Most companies are unable to track business and operating conditions in real time; instead, they make decisions based on data that has been uploaded into data warehouses or reports that are hours or even days old. Senior managers and executives spend too much time fixing, or trying to fix, problems long after they’ve occurred and the damage is done, in effect driving their business by looking in the rearview mirror. Many midsized and large companies have invested heavily in BI technology solutions to aid decision-making and compliance. Yet those systems are inherently limited by a reliance on historical perspective and are unable to help companies effectively respond to the pace of business today. Even though many BI vendors tout real-time capabilities, BI reports may be covering data that is already 30 to 60 minutes old (sufficient time for the stock market to drop a few hundred points) or even more dated. BI systems also lack the ability to view and analyze business process data or other sources of nontraditional data. Business activity monitoring (BAM) is another common toolset used in decision-making,