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04.09.07
Operational BI - An Oxymoron?
 By
James Taylor
Amit Chembukar and Prasanna Keny of Tata Consulting wrote Trends in Operational BI in BI Review. It's a nice article and they make some good points about the characteristics of the kinds of systems they discuss:
• Operational - delivering decisions in operational, transactional systems
• Low latency - something I have discussed a couple of times before in the context of risk management and decision latency in active data warehouses
• Granular - I would say transaction-centric as it is about using a single transaction to drive decisions not aggregating a bunch for reporting
• High availability - obviously these systems cannot go down, even while the way they make decisions is changing constantly
The authors talk about a "BI service at a decision point in a process". Me I call these "decision services" and they are a crucial design element if you are to bring "intelligence" to bear on a process or system. They go on to give three examples and it seemed to me that these are close to what I call Enterprise Decision Management or EDM.
• Their first example is a TSA system and my question is why bother with the reports at all given the need to "cater to bookings made between the report generation time and flight departure time" that resulted in "a service that accepted the name of a customer and returned potential matches from the TSA lists." This service could have been used as someone booked to flag them in a more event-based way. Indeed, this story illustrates why traditional BI ideas (reports) are so useless in operational systems. The report was produced because producing reports is what people are used to.
• The second example is an EDM example through and through - rules and analytics working together to recommend actions to the field.
• The third is another great EDM example - next best action being the primary customer-centric use of EDM (I presented about this at Teradata's conference, for example). Analytics and rules driving recommendations (actions) while more traditional BI technology is used to display useful contextual information that will help the conversation go smoothly. The feedback loop is another common EDM feature and when the "NBA function was packaged and deployed as a Web service" it is clearly a decision service.
All in all a nice article with some good examples of EDM.
I don't think that "Operational BI" is the right name for these kinds of decision-centric applications any more than I did when Keith Gile wrote about it or when I consider "BI 2.0" By and large the BI vendors do not understand this kind of system and all the dashboards and reporting tools they have developed are of little use in building them - there are critical differences between BI and EDM. Even the data you collect in your data warehouse may well be aggregated and processed in a way that makes it less helpful when you are trying to build these kinds of decisioning systems. If you think of these as "BI" systems, even "operational BI" systems you will bring the wrong perspective to bear. Think of them, instead, as decisioning systems.
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About the Author:
VP of Product Marketing with a passion for the technologies of decision automation. 15 years designing, developing, releasing and marketing advanced enterprise software platforms and development tools. Across the board experience in software development, engineering and product management and product marketing.
http://www.edmblog.com
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