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Summary
Our benchmark research study “Operational Business Intelligence” found that more mature organizations see operational BI as reducing the amount of time front-line workers and operational managers must spend hunting for information, leaving them more time for activities that benefit the business. With each step up in maturity, organizations want not only to make it easier to find information but also to increase the frequency with which the data that users access is updated, in some cases to rates approaching real time. Ventana Research believes having timely data is critical to achieving the top two business benefits of operational BI deployment: improving efficiency and improving customer service.

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Currently, intraday updating is considered table stakes for operational BI; nearly 80 percent of participants in our research study said that updating data that users access for BI one or more times a day is necessary. (The research was sponsored by Business Objects, IBM Cognos and InetSoft and media sponsors BusinessIntelligence.com, DM Review, Intelligent Enterprise and IT Business Edge.) Comparing the results of this study with those of earlier research (“Business Intelligence for Operational Performance,” 2005), reveals that organizations now are updating data more frequently – in one-third (32%) of participating organizations, more often than once a day. (Seven percent expressed a need for one or more updates per minute.) In the earlier study, just 12 percent of research participants said that operational BI users need information updated more than once an hour.

We found no industry category in which an update frequency of one or more times a day is unimportant. For example, 33 percent of participants from financial services, insurance and real estate (“FIRE”) industries said information should be updated one or more times an hour; driving this surge were the 45 percent of participants in the banking industry. “Time is money,” the adage goes, and this could not be more true than in banking and other financial services, where operational users working with investments, currencies and other instruments depend on current information for customer service and competitive differentiation.

Nearly one-third (31%) of participants from very large organizations of more than 10,000 employees said that users should get one or more data updates an hour; 7 percent indicated they should get one or more updates a minute. The need for this level of data update frequency is an important difference between operational BI and traditional strategic BI, since users of the latter either haven’t required frequent data refreshes or have been unable to get them due to technology limitations. The challenge of updating data frequently may explain why current operational BI user populations are often small compared to the total number of employees. Of organizations of this size, 31 percent said that their current operational BI deployments support fewer than 100 users. As deployments support increasing user populations, organizations across the size spectrum will have to consider how much business value they derive from frequent updating vs. the information management and technology expense involved. It is possible that the expense of increasing the frequency of updates to the levels that operational users said they should have is a reason why organizations have not yet deployed systems to much larger user populations.

In many organizations information management technology and processes will have to be overhauled to support a move from batch updating to real-time operational data warehousing on a very large scale – enterprise information integration (EII) or complex event processing (CEP). In addition, query performance, already a major dissatisfaction according to our research, could become an even bigger challenge. Supporting ever-increasing volumes of ad-hoc querying will require looking at new technology options such as data warehouse appliances dedicated to particular queries, large memory BI systems that provide users with more data to analyze locally as an alternative to frequently access to data on disk, and tools for change data capture to replace standard extract, transformation and loading (ETL) software. Moreover, the growth of operational BI will require IT to manage BI and data warehouse workloads more effectively to support user prioritization and effective querying.

Assessment
To gain operational advantages from information, organizations need to evaluate technology that can deliver data and update it faster than has been possible with traditional batch-oriented implementations of data warehousing and BI software. Fortunately, both established and newer vendors of BI tools and data warehouse systems are focusing development efforts on supporting more timely data and analysis. However, Ventana Research cautions organizations to acquire tools as part of an enterprise strategy to improve information management and operational processes; avoid creating more chaos and management complexity by installing new point solutions.

Our research found that organizations need to develop deeper, more accurate understanding of users’ information requirements and decision processes so that they can make new investments appropriately. By doing this they can avoid having to redo deployments, which will only delay the business benefits sought from operational BI. They also will avoid the inefficiency and expense of developing and deploying real-time BI and data warehousing without knowing which users or processes will benefit the most from them.

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