Best Practices in Operational BI
Research Methodology
Focus. This report is designed for the business or technical manager who oversees a BI environment and wishes to learn the best practices and pitfalls of implementing an operational BI capability.
Methodology. The research for this report is based on a survey that TDWI conducted in February 2007, as well as interviews with BI and analytics practitioners, consultants, and solution providers. The survey was sent to TDWI’s database of active BI professionals.
Respondent profile. A majority of the 423 survey respondents (63%) are corporate IT professionals who serve as mid-level managers in the U.S. and who work for large organizations. The bulk of the survey data presented in this report is based on 225 respondents whose groups have implemented operational BI according to TDWI’s definition of the term (see page 6 of the PDF). The remaining respondents said their groups were exploring or planning to implement operational BI, but had not done so yet.
Executive Summary
Operational business intelligence (BI) represents a turning point in the evolution of BI. Traditionally, BI has been the province of technically savvy business analysts who spend many hours with sophisticated tools analyzing trends and patterns in large volumes of historical data to improve the effectiveness of strategic and tactical decisions. But operational BI changes this equation: it moves BI out of the back room and embeds it into the fabric of the business, intertwining it with operational processes and applications that drive thousands of daily decisions. In essence, operational BI merges analytical and operational processes into a unified whole.
In addition, operational BI increases the value of BI by delivering information and insights on demand to all workers—from the shipping clerk to the CEO—so they can work smarter and faster to achieve critical business objectives. In essence, operational BI delivers the right information to the right people at the right time so they can take action. In its extreme form, operational BI encapsulates business insights into rules and models that organizations can use to automate decisions and responses, eliminating the need for human intervention. Automating decisions not only streamlines processes and reduces costs, but also improves service and gives organizations a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Beyond operational reporting. There are many flavors of operational BI, ranging from operational reporting and process monitoring to composite applications and decision automation. While most organizations already support some form of operational reporting, many have yet to embrace more complex types of operational BI that generate greater business value. Thus, operational BI opens up a new field of endeavor for BI and gives organizations a chance to reap greater dividends from their BI investments.
However, operational BI poses several challenges. It stretches the architectural boundaries of current BI solutions, forcing BI professionals to rethink the way they design and build systems. Queries must return in seconds rather than minutes or hours, and reports must update dynamically. Operational BI systems must capture large volumes of data in near real time without degrading the performance of existing processes and jobs on source or target systems. There is also less time to recover from a server outage, making it imperative for BI professionals to build resilient, highly available systems with sufficient backup and recovery.
This report describes the promise of operational BI and provides suggestions about how to surmount the challenges involved in converging operational and analytical processes.
