The use of search, for example Google Desktop, to mine the unstructured data repository that sits on our client-side machines with its emails, text documents, various Microsoft Office formats, chat messages etc., is a great time-saver because the information can be retrieved without the need to transfer and manipulate it. Producing structured data and storing it in a relational database or data warehouse is far more costly and time-consuming. BI vendors are increasingly looking to apply the analytics of traditional BI to the same source of unstructured data.
However, this type of activity has to be given a large health warning. Whereas much effort goes into ensuring data feeding into BI systems is valid and accurate, the unstructured mass of information is, by its nature, not cleansed, and therefore of secondary reliability.
The other avenue being explored by BI vendors is business process management (BPM) integration. The idea is to feed information on business processes into the intelligence appearing on the senior executive’s dashboard. The problem with this is that BI is most effective when it reveals the exceptions and the deltas within the organization’s processes, as simply offering more information on processes just adds to the information overload.
The detection of changes taking place that affect business – especially those changes that cost the business the most, namely the breakdown of processes due to exceptions – and particularly at an early, pre-critical stage, is just the type of information that becomes ‘timely intelligence.’ Understanding change within the organization requires having a memory of norms, and triggering when thresholds are violated.
Ideally, this works best when complex event processing (CEP) is in place; event monitoring then feeds through in an automated manner, from a highly granular level, filtering higher and higher as a more global picture is brought into focus. A BI system that is continually predicting and comparing against actual events and data in real-time, and notifying administrators, managers, and executives represents real intelligence, and it can be applied to a whole range of activities within the business, including front-line customer-facing, supply chain, corporate financials, and production performance.
IT infrastructure is being transformed by service-oriented architecture and BPM provides an essential link and enabler between the business and IT. Once this bedrock is implemented, CEP becomes a natural forward phase and added benefit. When these foundations are in place, BI can offer intelligence over information. This scenario is similar to business activity monitoring (BAM), except that you get BAM as a consequence of using BI with CEP, and in a far more integrated and versatile manner. This can also be called real-time BI – it amounts to the same concept but here we conceive it as an integral part of other BI activities.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
