I have seen how Business Intelligence (BI) technology has advanced the use of data in enterprises from reporting and analytics to dashboards and scorecards. A lot has been done in the last ten and actually twenty years with more to do as many organizations still plague themselves with spreadsheets and presentations emailed around as their actual deployments of BI. I think we should ask ourselves is the BI that we currently have the BI we need and can it operate at the right frequency and context to meet our business and IT needs?

A little background as BI mostly comes from data in database management systems associated with a data warehouse and data mart where data is stored or from enterprise applications where data is generated by transactions. Of course as many organizations need data more frequently from quarterly and monthly to weekly and daily, the pressure to process data faster is critical. This aspect of BI moves to what is commonly referred to as operational BI where the data is more operational and specific within the day or week of the business and made available to as many people at this level of the organization. Our firm, Ventana Research has done significant research and education on operational BI as further leverage of BI is important.

As many advanced and innovative companies have found, I have seen the value of having operational BI that is managed efficiently is critical to improving performance. But it requires an information architecture that only operates as fast as the data is accessed or moved and then processed for interaction by someone who generates reports or dashboards before being used by actual operational users to find out what might be in the data that is relevant for taking action. This is in essence what BI provides for IT and business with some additional elements of the platform and tools depending on the vendor and implementation.

But is this all that you can do to provide information and insight? In many industries from manufacturing, retail, health care, banking and others have need to have visibility and operate at the pace from which organizations actually run but actually take action on issues and opportunities. To accomplish this is only really possible by using the actual events and chatter that happens across the network from the application, systems and people to the servers and broader network. By monitoring these events whether business or technology and processing them through workflow and rules should utilize varying depth of analytics, and then surfaced useful forms of information inside of applications, alerts, dashboards, mobile or other technologies. Of course this is only the first part as you should be able be able to take action on relevant events triggering further notification and processing to drive change from the information sourced from events. 

I have spent many years advocating the cousin of BI called Operational Intelligence which leverages event-based architectures to provide immediate processing of data as it happens across the network. This technology and approach is not new though the category of discussion has been advancing in the last four years. This new term Operational Intelligence should not be confused with Operational BI which operates on data-based architectures not event ones. I personally spent many years in the late 80’s engineering this technology and monitoring retail store point of sale systems to determine when specific events were executed to determine when specific types of shopping baskets were closed or when coupons should be provided to the consumer. This experience has provided me some personal insight and perspective on what can be done to drive this information technology to further business value.

Of course a lot has changed over the last couple of decades but the concepts have not, and businesses along with IT have been slow to further exploit this technology. Now we have seen some changes in the recent years with new technologies from vendors demonstrating the art of what is possible. Of course for many other vendors they have been acquired to be part of the larger technology providers as the demand and market for the technologies has not been as active as it should be until recently. We are also beginning to see how many technologies in Operational Intelligence are using events and in some cases complex event processing (CEP) to trigger data or event based queries to historical repositories and determine further context of the events as part of the processing. Yet more proof on how to actually embody more intelligence into our information systems that provide key information to IT and business management.

There are many vendors that have continued to advance Operational Intelligence and recently I had a chance to get the latest from SeeWhy who has taken the use of events across consumer and proprietary networks to determine fraud and governance type needs. I also reviewed what Vitria has done to transform components of their business process management technologies into Operations Book. And the winner of the Ventana Research 2008 Leadership Awards was AgentLogic who has helped governmental agencies like the US Coast Guard protect and prepare their assets for use across the country. Of course I would be remiss not to mention Tibco and their advancements in many of their new tools along with advancements with integration into their acquisition of Spotfire  and utilizing events Tibco actually creates. IBM is stepping forward to advance their efforts in what they call Business Event Processing and leverage experience and technology like IBM MQ Series and IBM WebSphere through their recent acquisition and advancement of AptSoft. And what could be an industry changing event itself is from the network provider Cisco who operates a large percentage of the traffic in enterprises and the Internet who has introduced a new technology called Network Mining that advances Operational Intelligence.

Now many in the industry are confused at least from mine and many others are still using an old term called Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) which was created many years ago. Unfortunately the term and describing use of the term represent only one small component of what is required in this type of technology. Both of these terms have the context of event monitoring and utilizing a model relates events together and into a higher context sometimes referred to as an activity. But the conventional wisdom of clinging to the past is what has prevented many organizations from innovating or gaining competitive advantage. As you look to find methods to advance your business you should look beyond the simple constraints of BAM and investigate Operational Intelligence which can leverage events but deliver the insight and action that your operational users and management need to be effective.

Well, this is the charge and opportunity for many of you to look beyond what you have done so far with Business Intelligence and examine the new category of Operational Intelligence which is every day and for many every second providing the information and insight required to enable operational efficiency and prioritization required to deliver the effectiveness and results needed to survive in this global economy or governmental responsibility. I hope you look at the New Year and 2009 as an opportunity to examine how to be smarter in using information technology like Operational Intelligence. Whether or not you are examining the customer or supply chain processes or the IT systems and network, Operational Intelligence can provide new methods for you to get information and take action. Your organization might just reduce the time and costs of operating business and IT along with reducing the risk in not meeting your critical operational performance objectives.

Let me know your thoughts or come and collaborate with me on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Regards,

Mark Smith
CEO & EVP Research