New Generation Business Intelligence
How was that possible we wondered? and performed a very quick analysis. What we found was that the Campaign Management platform used data from a data mart inside the enterprise data warehouse to create the target list. Due to the inherent nature of the data warehouse architecture and the design of the refresh frequency inside the data warehouse, the data being used to run the campaigns was at least 24-48 hours old.
In a dynamic world of mobile telephony 48 hours could be equivalent to an era. In an environment where the subscriber can change his/her profile/plan/products/service offerings online(24/7) on the internet self service portal and the services/products are activated real time, the marketing department just cannot rely on data as old as 48 hours, to churn campaigns. This is just not a viable way of running business.
In the modern day of e-business and a 24/7 services that businesses need to provide, we cannot work with and run our enterprises by using data which are days, weeks or even months old. The mantra today is to react to a situation that 'is happening’ rather than knowing what ‘had happened’ a day or a week or even a month earlier. In today’s business, things are quite random and dynamic without much of a regular or stable pattern. Just because you sold well last Thanks giving season does not mean that you will be selling well this time around. So many other things can come in between like an economic slump, a hurricane or any other natural calamity which would make the last years data meaningless. The emphasis would be to try to track your business as and when it happens, gather the intelligence real time, analyze it rapidly and react on a ‘real time basis’.
Business Intelligence /Information Systems before the era of internet or e-business were typically used by a select group of analysts running some complex queries/reports for the use of CEO/CFO/CTO/directors. In that by-gone climate of doing business, most enterprises were not ‘real time’ and dare I say not as dynamic, and were able to afford the delay in analyzing the enterprise data. Reaction time was not paramount!
Come the era internet and e-business of mid or late 90’s and the concepts of business hours, location,, geographic presence etc. became blurred. Most business or parts of it were run on the wire and on a 24/7 basis. Customer/client and quality of services became the central theme of every business. Every other enterprise/organization had to be ‘e-enabled’ in order to survive and remain competitive. Along with the systems becoming online and e-enabled, it also became apparent that in order to understand the business situation and its behaviour and react to the situation ,the age old way of gathering information in a batch mode for analysis would not be of any ‘real ‘ benefit. To maximize the benefits in this new era Business Intelligence would need to be ‘real time’ and ‘pervasive’.
In my opinion these are the two key aspects which are going to drive business intelligence and data warehousing architecture and landscape of the next generation.
A) Real Time Data Integration:
Making data available on a real time to the users for use is going to be something that the next generation datawarehouse/BI platform is going to stand on. What we are possibly going to to see is a strong amalgamation of the EAI technologies(real-time integration) with the traditional ETL/ELT technologies. While the EAI tools are likey to be scaled up to handle higher data volumes than what they are currently capable of, the ETL/ELT tools would be provided the capabilities of real time data integration. Many of the current Business Intelligence product vendors are working towards that direction. Oracle Corporation for one is definitely an early adopter of this philosophy. It has come up with many real time integration features in its BI products. In its data base product it has added features like Change Data Capture(CDC) to provide real time integration capabilities and use of materialized views. A lot of advanced features on real time integration are being provided with Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) the flagship ELT tol from Oracle.
B).Pervasive BI:
Gone are the days when data was used by a set of analysts or a few IT professionals to create reports which were mailed every morning to the CxO. BI as a concept has come of age, today organizations are looking at the making BI relevant at the bottom most layer of the organization’s value chain.
Making analyzed and vital customer buying pattern available to the Call centre agent while the customer has called up for an issue could enable the agent to cross-sell a suitable product. This is just one simple example of pervasive BI, there could be so many other places where BI could be made pervasive. Keeping vital and essential operational data locked up in the mail boxes/folders of the directors is not going to help business prosper in the long run. Utilizing operational Business Intelligence and making it pervasive is what is going to drive the business of the next generation. Many of the OLAP vendors in the market, including Oracle, are taking to this and coming up with utilities and features in their OLAP offerings by which an end user can easily and very quickly create reports by dragging and dropping objects and be immediately be able to see results.
