Operational business intelligence (OBI) systems provide an intermediate step toward satisfying the strategic needs that data warehouses address as well as the tactical decision making that EAI addresses. An OBI system provides an event database that is frequently updated. As an historical database, the event log summarizes and satisfies strategic requirements. With frequent updates, strategic decision making extends to daily or intra-day information that is used to immediately take operational action to address an immediate problem.
Colin White, a leading author and consultant in the field of business intelligence, noted that “Competitive pressures … are forcing companies to react faster to changing business conditions and customer requirements. As a result, there is now a need to use BI [business intelligence] to help drive and optimize business operations on a daily basis and, in some cases, even for intra-day decision making. This type of BI is usually called operational business intelligence. … The objective of operational BI is to make more timely business decisions; and, therefore, it has a close relationship to the subject of real-time or right-time BI processing.”
Indeed, operational business intelligence (OBI) systems abound today. Conceptually, OBI systems are thought of as a data mart that is updated frequently (daily or every few hours) with minibatches. We liken OBI systems to data marts because they generally focus on a specific task rather than on enterprise-wide functions. For instance, as shown in Figure 7, an OBI system might be periodically fed ATM and POS (point-of-sale) transactions. Its data-mining engine will then search for potentially fraudulent activity and prepare reports of such activity. After a review of these reports, a hold might be put on some credit or debit cards until the activity is resolved.
OBI systems bring together two needs for business intelligence – an historical database for strategic analysis and the capability to make rapid suggestions for operational actions. A capability is required next to make real-time suggestions for actions that are taken immediately upon the occurrence of some specified event. This capability is real-time business intelligence.
Real-time business intelligence is also known as event-driven business intelligence. In order to react in real-time, a business intelligence system must react to events as they occur – not minutes or hours later. We look now at architectures that allow a business to react proactively in real-time to events as they occur rather than reactively at some time after they have happened.
Real-Time Business Intelligence Pages
- Real-Time Business Intelligence Introduction
- Part 1 - The Evolution of Real-Time Business Intelligence
- Part 2 - What is Business Intelligence?
- Part 3 - The History of Business Intelligence
- Part 4 - Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)
- Part 5 - Operational Business Intelligence
- Part 6 - Real-Time Business Intelligence
- Part 7 - The Operational Store (ODS): The Next Evolutionary Step
- Part 8 - Real-Time Business Information Solutions from Gravic
- Real-Time Business Intelligence Summary