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What is your definition of real time business intelligence?
What do you consider "real time" business intelligence? Information that gets there within milliseconds, or is information from 6-8 hours previous still considered real time? How much more useful is real time business intelligence than just standard BI?
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6 Answers
I need to separate discussion of BI and realtime.
It was started about 4 years ago when I have question in mind why BI is not real time. Business is real time and decision should be race with time. It does not make sense if a CEO make a meeting for an urgent situation and then his colleague said, we must wait until tomorrow to get the latest information.
At that time I got name BI 2.0. BI 2.0 extend the BI (well maybe I better say it BI 1.0) functionality. BI 2.0 talks about more accessibility from BI to the data to make it simpler. Many company has implement BI in very high price with complicated architecture. But what they have? Another one hour or even one day to get the latest information because of the system need that time.
BI should serve what is the user needed without assistance. Probably the data is structured or unstructured. That’s why BI needs ability to have access data to anywhere and perform the process on the fly.
And what is real time? A few months ago I talked with my customer about real time data. I said to them, this information would not be realtime because it depends to other system send the data. It would be 5 minutes delay. And the customer said, WOW!! Even you said it is 30 minutes delay, I will say it is real time, no doubt. So what is real time means? I think it’s depend of the business need.
As a BI provider I get asked this question all the time. "Can you provide "real time" data". The simple answer is yes. If the data warehouse is built correctly TARGIT can connect relationally to the data warehouse or multi dimensionally through the OLAP cubes. The real question though is does the Company's Business Process support real time reporting. And in most cases the answer is NO. Whether it is reporting on Inventory or Sales numbers, too often the business process does not support real time. If a company truly understands BI than the business process has to be created in conjunction with building the BI Solution.
Christy, despite of all that you may have read or heard, BI is a JIT business function; the term "real-time" does not apply. Real-time is a data warehousing data management term. The OSS vendors will hopefully wake up one day and realize that BI needs to be available within every layer of the organization including the frontline. When this happens, you will have OSS solution that does not segregate between current profile and historical data and BI will be more available to the organization. Wouldn't it be nice to be speaking to a customer about a problem and during the discussion as you apply different services, the customer's profitability index changes in front of you? Just imagine how powerful that would be for a CSR. That will allow you to push decision making directly to the front line. This is very achievable if architected correctly.
Real time business intelligence is information that arrives in the same way one receives information of current speed, fuel remaining, and revolutions per minute when driving the family car. This information arrives in milliseconds and helps the driver of the family car avoid a speeding ticket or running out of gas on the freeway. In the business world, enterprise management/monitoring tools provide the same information. The challenge in the business world is that system designers forget to establish baselines prior to deploying software to solve a business problem. Without a baseline, the business decision maker does not know if his current speed is above or below the established speed limit – and guessing becomes the standard. This approach does not work regardless how much data one collects. If one establishes baselines and measures the deviation from norm – just as the speedometer does in your car – real time business intelligence is a reality. I know how to make this happen.
Real-time, at least as far as I am concerned, is actually real-time. I.e., as information comes in (orders, customer website visits, etc), should anyone be looking at the information, it is reflective of the most recent data. At TQLeads.com this is the sort of rigid definition we are building into our platform.
You need a very good architecture and a fast platform to do these sorts of things.
The future for real-time BI (particularly real-time market analysis and customer acquisition) is actually very exciting. Things are changing very rapidly.
As for my clients, real time is - real time.
If they, for example, rearrange some plans in their Excel data which are linked to Data Warehouse, they expect that change to be in reports next minute, not tommorow.
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