Use your intelligence

Operational business intelligence promises a faster route to the complete picture than traditional BI, allowing quicker and more effective decisions at all levels of the organisation. Danny Bradbury investigates

Imagine this scenario: you are running the IT department for a large retailer, and a truck turns up at your warehouse with a load of teddy bears. The warehouse manager has nowhere to put them, and does not have the people to deal with them. He has to make a choice: send them back to the supplier, or route them to another warehouse - and if he does reroute them, to which warehouse?

Traditionally, such decisions might be made after a lot of phone calls or, worse still, off the cuff without any thought - just send them back to the supplier, perhaps incurring a penalty. Instead, wouldn't it be useful to combine historical data with transactional data to make a more informed decision? Pulling in data about your history with this supplier, stock levels in different warehouses around the country, and regional sales information about particular product types could help your warehouse manager make a better decision, but only if it can be presented simply.

Making operational decisions based on complicated data gleaned from multiple sources is what real-time business intelligence is supposed to be about. Business intelligence supplier Information Builders has coined the term "operational business intelligence" (OBI) to describe it. The difference between traditional business intelligence and OBI is that whereas the former focuses on historical data in a datawarehouse to perform long-term analytics, the latter draws data from transactional systems to better inform short-term decisions, sometimes on a minute-by-minute basis.

The OBI concept has been around for a while, surfacing in different companies at different times. But the definition is nebulous, says Craig McCollum, vice-president for business solutions strategy at Microsoft, who worked for various business intelligence suppliers for at least 15 years before joining Microsoft.

Some people concentrate on delivering real-time information to operational workers, while others think that daily or weekly business intelligence reports, delivered to line managers to help monitor performance, qualifies under the term.

The best way to place OBI is at one end of a business intelligence spectrum. At the more traditional end sits analytical BI, where small numbers of managers make strategic decisions based on analysing historical data, crunched by the datawarehouse.

More regularly updated BI might be used to crunch weekly sales figures by region and keep your team on track, or may be used to create a weekly scorecard for your call centre.

Real-time or near-real-time BI sits at the far end of the spectrum, and delivers data to a larger number of people, such as call centre operatives and their supervisors. The closer you get to that end of the spectrum, the more it qualifies as OBI.

Eric Rogge, vice-president and research director for business intelligence and analytics at Ventana Research, is a strong advocate of the idea. "OLAP was originally there to support analysts and that isn't what operations is about," says Rogge. "The primary aspect of that is more about alerting and prioritisation, and less about how many angels dance on the head of a pin or some other arcane analytics."

Not all analysts are as supportive. Real-time OBI does not involve traditional BI tools, according to consultant Nigel Pendse. Companies running systems that require such tools - such as railway control systems and financial trading systems - already have this real-time operational reporting hard-wired in. "They are being very patronising about the people who have built these operational systems," he says, adding that those applications that don't already have such facilities built in are not going to need them in the future.

Anyway, says Charlie Davies, group marketing manager of IT services company Touchstone, companies have been able to generate real-time reports for years with products like Crystal Reports, so what's new?

Integrating the data into the line of business applications behind the scenes is one key part of the OBI argument. The idea is that the data should appear in the context of the job that the operative is doing, making the data actionable, so the employee can make a business decision there and then. "I want this to be the type of application that pops up on the warehouse guy's computer where he has the plastic cover on the keyboard because his hands are so dirty. That's the kind of thing that people are looking for," says Rogge.

Although application suppliers in some vertical markets may have that hard-wired into their systems, such bespoke development is expensive and difficult. BI suppliers want to muscle in on that business, working with partners to create new applications that come with live feeds from diverse sources.

Few people, if any, are doing real-time BI delivered into line of business applications yet. Nevertheless, people are closer along the spectrum, with some providing report-based information on an hourly basis, designed for operational supervisors to act upon.

Stephen Segel, finance director for recruitment firm Blue Group International, says that second-by-second information is not relevant at all in his business, but hourly reports are of use in terms of financial control. "We reflect back to operations what timesheets we have received from the organisation. That goes to every single consultant in this business (about 100 people). They can see what timesheets their candidates have received, so they can phone up immediately to ensure that they get their timesheets through," he says.

As companies move further along the spectrum from analytical to operational business intelligence, they will encounter business performance management, which ties closely into operational reporting. Applix, for example, sells the TM1 scorecard reporting system, providing companies with snapshots of how their business is doing.

Mark Bodger, business information controller at Littlewoods, uses it to produce a weekly data update for operational managers, and mixes product information, warehousing stock data and sales figures that help them to plan their resource allocation. "Let's say we have two warehouse locations, one for fashion and one for electronics," he says. "They need to know what the demand will be week by week in unitary terms for those two warehouses. Then they could work out their manpower requirements."

Littlewoods is reducing the frequency of data reporting in certain areas to move it further along the business intelligence spectrum. "There are developments going on in the call centres at the moment to do that," he says. "We want data like the number of calls per minute per customer service adviser. That is a detailed, quarter-of-an-hourly snapshot of data. It is operational planning at its finest." That type of application might enable a call centre supervisor to spot problems with an operative who was not properly trained, or perhaps with a group of operatives who were taking longer to complete calls because they could not find answers to a particular query.

The question is, how do companies move towards real-time BI without affecting their operational systems? If a transactional system such as a customer order database is under a heavy load, hitting it with extra queries to provide call-centre operators with decision support could slow it down.

Information Builders, eager to sell its integration and messaging tool iWay, suggests you do it by building business tools into your message bus. Getting an integration tool to monitor different back-end systems as they message each other lets you listen passively to what is happening in your applications without having to go in and directly query data.

"It sits, listens, detects and, depending on what it hears, can do anything - decision analysis or simple alerts," says Dennis Allen, vice-president EMEA, for the company. "It is a more focused BI approach in that it does not just run reports." So it could trigger an alert for the call-centre supervisor if, for example, certain conditions were met concurrently in different applications, such as the customer database, ordering system, product inventory and call-centre routing system.

Listening on the message bus also enables you to constantly update a datawarehouse using a trickle-feed mechanism, rather than performing a batch update and rebuilding at the end of every day, contends Cliff Longman, chief technical officer of datawarehousing company Kalido. This can be useful if you want to blend current transactional data with historical information to enable people to make better decisions.

Companies like Information Builders will have a hard time getting companies to the point where they can integrate data from multiple sources in real-time and slice and dice the data for decision-support purposes. Nevertheless, companies continue to squeeze more value out of their data by pulling it from live systems into simplified reporting tools or line-of-business applications on an hourly, daily or weekly basis, to help larger numbers of staff further down the company hierarchy.

Case study: De Montfort University cracks student data problem

In the academic world, where students are your customers, IT managers face a complex reporting problem. At De Montfort University, John Shelton has to keep 23,500 students happy every day.

Shelton, who is head of the university's business systems group, has to populate the Managed Learning Environment (MLE), a student portal that connects to multiple systems to serve data, including grades and class information. Students can log into the system and see grades when they become available, with each student's profile on the system generally updated on a 24-hour basis. But Shelton also has to prepare complex assessment reports for each student in June and October which are submitted to the review board. These reports are used to evaluate each student's future options.

"They could be entering marks until the 11th hour of the day before the board sits," says Shelton, describing the pressure the IT department was under to deliver accurate, up-to-date data. Now he uses Information Builders' iWay software, its messaging and integration tool that extracts data from applications and crunches the numbers at the back-end before delivering them to the reporting tool. "We use the extraction, transaction and loading (ETL) tool to pull out information from the live student records system into a datamart, which is then used by the MLE."

Using the messaging and integration software lets Shelton serve both the review board and the students by extracting a subset of information from the university's operational systems without having to hit the live database with huge queries all the time. This helps to maintain transactional performance while keeping reporting data up to date.