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High Impact, Low Latency - The Promise of Real-Time BI

By finding faster and more effective ways to turn raw data into actionable information, organizations can shorten business cycles, increase responsiveness to changing business conditions and gain a competitive edge. Business intelligence (BI) technology has made this possible by making corporate data available to an unlimited number of people inside and outside the enterprise, so they can use it to make faster and more informed decisions, identify new opportunities and analyze performance. However, since most BI applications access information that has been staged to a data warehouse, users can only react to events that have already taken place. Managers have intelligent tools to analyze problems, but they typically use them after the fact. This is a reactive way of running a business.

As the pace of business increases, managers and executives must be able to instantly detect and respond to changes and opportunities - both in the markets they serve and within their internal sphere of operations. This shift is motivating the creation of business intelligence applications that can not only extract information from a data warehouse or operational data store but also incorporate information as part of an automated workflow process. These real-time BI systems make information actionable, and they support critical business processes through their integration with real-time or near-real-time data. They have built-in integration capabilities that can detect or "listen" for events, read and enrich messages, and automatically create human-readable documents.

Effectively meeting this need requires BI tools with significant deployment flexibility and built-in integration capabilities. Unlike traditional BI applications, which monitor slowly moving indicators and trends, real-time BI applications are designed for users who cannot afford to make decisions based on old data. Instead of understanding the past, they must understand the present.

The Application of Real-Time BI

Business changes, issues and opportunities are typically manifested as events - whether it's a customer placing an order, a supplier delivering materials or a manager acknowledging a transaction. Information about each transaction is transmitted to business applications such as billing, purchasing or supply chain planning. Real-time BI systems use these events as triggers to deliver additional messages so managers can take appropriate action.

There are many important uses for this type of technology. For example, when orders are taken by an order-entry system or a bill of material is updated, these events might notify other applications within the enterprise as part of an automated workflow. This type of exchange involves rapidly correlating information that is part of work-in-process, right now. It doesn't happen as part of a nightly batch feed, and it isn't necessarily triggered by something a user initiates, such as querying a database. It's much more proactive.

In some cases, users are asked to supply input, perhaps to correlate events with data obtained from other parts of the business process. In that sense, real-time BI solutions are a lot like business activity monitoring (BAM) and business event monitoring (BEM) solutions that help organizations track, monitor and forecast everything from package deliveries to crime patterns. These types of information systems alert people to business events by monitoring key performance indicators for problems or opportunities. Typically, alerts are communicated through an integrated messaging system, but they can also be transmitted via e-mail, an instant message or a telephone call.

Ideally, the alerts should provide users with enough information and context to instantly assess a situation and determine how to respond. When properly constructed, these information systems enable users to look across multiple business applications and accept events from multiple sources, such as those supporting customer relationships, the supply chain and sales transactions. Information can be propagated from any information source - real-time ERP transactions, warehoused data, business-to-business systems - and delivered to line managers, executives or automated business processes.

Adopting a Proactive Mind-Set

By proactively identifying problems and sending alerts accompanied by relevant information to appropriate systems or individuals, a real-time BI solution enables managers to quickly address and resolve issues before they reach critical mass - or take advantage of an opportunity while it is still hot. Doing this effectively requires a proactive, real-time perspective. At most companies, executives receive reports and then start asking questions. They have intelligent tools to analyze problems, but they typically use them after the fact. Real-time BI solutions enable managers and executives to audit, improve or provide input to a business process as it happens.

In addition to auditing business processes, this type of real-time BI solution can be used to alert individuals to changes in the business that might require action. For example, Delaware, New York City, Houston and other state and local governments are currently using surveillance systems that rely on BI and integration software to identify trends and hasten the response to potential healthcare emergencies. The software creates an extremely effective first-response system, protecting citizens from potential threats of bioterrorism.

Real-time BI applications can also provide aggregated insight to line of business managers involved in strategic planning. A database trigger or stored procedure might send a message when a predefined threshold is reached, such as when inventory falls below a certain level or new sales figures are available. Additional components of a real-time BI application often include a dashboard or console that is integrated with the alerting system. The console might reveal the status of a particular business process or operational function, along with historical information, analytic functions and process controls.

For example, consider a high-tech manufacturer who uses a real-time BI application to monitor production volume and component inventory. Using statistical calculations, the application determines that there will be a material shortage within three hours. An alert is sent to the production manager, who checks the console to further understand the context. In this case, he decides that surplus components should be transferred from one production facility to another. He uses the real-time display to determine which shipping resources are available and to create a work-order document authorizing the transfer of components.

The Right Technology for the Job

Setting up a demand-driven business intelligence environment that supports real-time as well as staged access to information requires a highly flexible, comprehensive software architecture. In a nutshell, these applications must combine the real-time alerting functionality of a business activity management system, the historical information and analytic power of a BI environment, and the context and execution engine of a business process management system.

This is a big shift in the way most reporting applications process information. Traditional or analytical BI applications rely on extract, transform and load (ETL) tools to keep a data repository current, perhaps once a day or once a week. This provides an excellent view of business entities, but not much of a view of business processes - as parts flows through an assembly line, money flows through a stock exchange or trucks enter and leave embarkation points. In order to make rational decisions about what should happen in each of these scenarios, users need to be notified as events occur. They also need the ability to correlate these events with other parts of the business process.

These business requirements necessitate BI tools that can both query and update databases, so users can intervene into automated business processes to supply input. The tools must be able to reach into many different types of databases, applications, file types and data streams, and coordinate enterprise-reporting activities with the information infrastructure at large. To ensure adequate performance, real-time BI tools must access data on the fly in native formats and combine dissimilar data types. They should not require a data warehouse; rather, they should be able to work directly with data in a company's production information systems. There is a corollary benefit to this type of architecture: establishing real-time links to production data sources avoids the costly process of extracting, modeling and loading data into separate reporting databases.

Finally, the tools should support triggers and alerts so the BI process can interface with transaction systems and be triggered by events occurring in those systems. It's not just how many sources a BI tool can access that's important, but how well the tool can exploit each individual interface. Can it trigger the stored procedures of any relational DBMS, support variable-length records in VSAM files on the mainframe and provide packaged native interfaces to ERP systems, such as SAP R/3, BW, BAPI, iDoc and OLE DB? These are the types of questions developers must ask.

With this type of technology at their disposal, developers can create BI applications that monitor multiple business applications and accept events from multiple sources, such as those supporting customer relationships, the supply chain, and sales transactions.

Making Better Decisions - Information Now

Today's organizations are discovering that they want to pull information from their BI systems as well as react to information that the environment generates on their behalf. Gartner users the term real-time enterprise (RTE) to describe this phenomenon, defining an RTE as an organization that competes by using up-to-date information to progressively remove delays to the management and execution of its critical business processes. As more and more businesses strive for this ideal, there is growing interest in reducing the latency of BI delivery. Making faster decisions based on real-time information can benefit enterprises seeking faster and more efficient operational processes.

Of course, providing information to the people who are responsible for making decisions and taking action is a critical element of any integrated information system. To be effective, business information needs to be available on a real-time or a near-real time basis. Only then can employees make informed decisions about where to focus their efforts, as they fine-tune operations ranging from claims processing to inventory replenishment. By moving BI to this real-time, operational level, the people directly involved in the business processes can leverage data to make better decisions on a more immediate basis.


Michael Corcoran is chief communications officer at New York-based Information Builders, Inc, a software company that supplies technology for enterprise business intelligence and real-time Web rfeporting. The company's WebFOCUS product meets the reporting needs of the extended enterprise, ranging from analysts to power users to large self-service reporting environments. WebFOCUS is highly regarded for its ability to leverage many different types of data and applications, both from production sources and data warehouse installations. You can contact him at michael_corcoran@ibi.com.

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