Ventana Research believes that as organizations strive to improve their business operations, they will need to address limitations in standard practices, processes and technology that could thwart the achievement of their objectives. One of these limits is found in the kind of information available to decision-makers. While business intelligence (BI) analysis and reporting of data drawn from previously recorded transactions continue to be useful, employees and processes in business operations and front-line customer sales, service and support also need the ability to detect and respond to events as they are happening. Operational intelligence (OI) is a set of event-centered information gathering and delivering processes that enable people to make better decisions and make it possible for automated processes to respond to events based on business rules and actionable information.
In many industries, organizations can gain competitive advantages if they can reduce the elapsed time between an event and when decisions can be made about how to respond to that event or to larger changes discovered by monitoring and pattern analysis of a series of related events. Regulatory compliance and efforts to combat money laundering, terrorism or other criminal behavior also depend on reducing information latency through the techniques of OI. Both business objectives and regulatory requirements are driving demand for OI technology and practices; among the activities that need them are algorithmic trading, dynamic pricing, yield management, risk management, fraud detection, surveillance, supply chain and call center optimization, online commerce and gaming.
The benefits OI offers are causing a shift in companies’ priorities and spending for information and application management. The range of options itself is a challenge for both business and IT leaders. Some organizations see potential in expanding their network infrastructure to support OI. Others are testing and implementing complex event processing (CEP) systems, which employ new forms of database technology to discover and detect meaningful patterns, anomalies and relationships between events. Yet others are beginning to implement dashboards, visualization and modeling to make it easier for people to be notified of events, to understand their significance and to take immediate action. Finally, organizations also are assessing how OI and enabling technologies such as CEP can serve their objectives for operational BI and performance management.
