Posts Tagged ‘Operational BI’

Chasm Not Crossed as A Sensor Data Tsunami Comes Over The Horizon

Monday, June 21st, 2010

Just over a week ago I spent a day at SensorExpo in Chicago to present on Complex Event Processing (CEP) discussing how CEP engines, Predictive Analytics, business rules can be used to analyse sensor emitted event data in-motion to facilitate business optimisation.  This was a very busy conference.  I estimated at least 2000-3000 people on the exhibition floor with maybe 400 on the conference.  I found around 100 vendors with all kinds of sensor devices on show exhibiting their products and services.  To my surprise however I had only heard of 2 of the vendors. IBM and Texas Instruments.  The floor was heaving with people looking to instrument their business operations to measure everything from movement, temperature, energy consumption, stress, heat, fluid volumes, pipeline flows and RFIDs.  There were analog devices and digital devices.  When taking to the vendors the big common denominator was that they are all trying to collect the data from sensor networks and RFIDs to analyse it.  Yet other than IBM there was not a single BI vendor in sight. Not even a single complex event processing (CEP) vendor in sight.   I was shocked because this market is clearly booming.   What was even more surprising was that I could not find an IT professional anywhere. 99.9% of all delegates and speakers were engineers.

Attending some of the case studies I found some fantastic applications of the use of sensor networks and RFIDs.  Healthcare with sensors all over hospitals with equipment and patients all tagged with RFIDs.  The return on investment in this case was fraud prevention on equipment (theft mainly) and process improvement for patients.  Another session I attended was one on monitoring stress in all the bridges in the US – over 700000 of them.  Some of the stats being quoted by the speakers were staggering.  “Well we are emitting, 3 events per minute from every sensor on a 7×24 hour basis. After 6 months operating like this we have over 20 PETABYTES of data”.  You read it right 20 PETABYTES.   A lot of the technical focus at the conference was on energy harvesting to prolong sensor battery life,  but the business message was clear as a bell.  Process optimisation, preventative maintenance and cost reduction comes from instrumenting business operations.  Manufacturing production lines, supply chains, product distribution, asset management.  You name it, they’re measuring it.

So I have to ask, where are all the BI vendors? Where are all the analytical DBMS vendors? Where are the CEP products, the real-time dashboards and predictive analytical models for automated analysis?  This is an operational BI gold mine.  Yet there are no mainstream vendors in sight bar IBM (at least someone there is switched on to what is happening).  The volume of data coming over the horizon from the adoption of sensor networks and RFIDs is nothing short of massive.  What is also clear is that this is already going on in enterprises and IT are blissfully unaware of it in the main.  Clearly IT BI professionals have got to get in touch with their Engineering colleagues and engineers have got to be made aware of mainstream data integration, analytical database and BI platform technologies as well as CEP software of course.  In my 29 years in the industry, I don’t think I have ever seen a chasm between IT and business not even explored never mind crossed.  Yet the value of CEP and mainstream DW/BI to this market is nothing short of enormous.   It is symptomatic of a young market heaving with engineers that has yet to be tied into mainstream IT to exploit far more robust software than is being used on this data at present.  What an opportunity. What a huge opportunity.  It most certainly is going to re-define large databases when we have to set them up for analysis of historical event data emitted by these devices.  CEP has to go there. CEP vendors have to get out of just being in the financial markets and wake up to a ton of data in motion being emitted by the growing number of devices.  An article I read recently said that Sensors empower an Internet of Things.  Well, those things are coming over the horizon emitting a Tsunami of data. It is time CEP and DW/BI vendors woke up an smelt the coffee and became aware of this rapidly growing market.  CIOs had better take heed too because they are going to have to integrate it into mainstream IT.

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Some BI Ideas for 2009

Wednesday, December 24th, 2008

So here we are at the end of 2008. Another amazing year in the area of BI. In the 18 years I have been specialising in this IT sector, I suppose you might wonder what else is there to do here. After all BI is a mature market, indeed many of my clients today could be classified as very mature users of business intelligence (BI). Some are on their second, third or even fourth generation of BI system implementations, with data warehouses and data marts, web enabled ad hoc query, reporting, and OLAP tools already deployed and well established across their user base.

Yet there is plenty more that can be done. A key question is how can companies with mature BI set-ups strengthen and evolve their existing investment? I still see lots of opportunity as we head into 2009.

There are several areas emerging to enhance and build on existing BI investment that can offer more value to a business. These include:

  • Integration of BI with Information Management infrastructure for trusted data
  • Integration of BI with Performance Management software to roll up metrics into higher level KPIs
  • Capturing of additional insight from unstructured content (e.g. customer emails) and from external information on the internet (e.g. about market intelligence and about what people are saying about your products and services)
  • Event driven and on-demand Operational BI – a hugely exciting area for 2009 to continuously monitor operations and deliver right -time BI in the context of process activities for continuous business optimisation
  • Integration of Enterprise Search with BI to open up broader access to intelligence via a search interface
  • Exploitation of appliances for lower total cost of ownership on specific workloads
  • Integration of BI with social software and collaboration workspaces to facilitate sharing and exploitation of knowledge in a collaborative environment. This is particularly relevant for those of you wishing to exploit products IBM Lotus Quickr quickplaces as well as Microsoft SharePoint workspaces. Integrating BI here will become increasingly important in 2009

These are just some of the ideas I will be discussing in the coming year and in a tough economic climate BI has never been more important. I wish all of you the best for the holiday season.

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Flood Gates on Operational BI on the Verge Of Breaking Wide Open

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

It seems that everywhere I look the number of vendors gearing up for Operational BI is just massing as if awaiting an onslaught on the market. Among them include HP, IBM, InforSense, Progress, Tibco, SL, ThinkAnalytics and many more. Key to this is event driven data integration, in-memory data, predictive analytics and rules engines. Vendors like SL have even released a data cache for in-memory analytics with its RTView product. Progress is also pushing with its Aparma product and long term pioneer ThinkAnalytics are also doing well. Clearly the giants are also moving to get all their pieces in play. IBM’s acquisition of German rules vendor iLOG looks like it could also be used in the world of on-demand and automated decisioning. Also SAP Business Objects Labs have released a prototype on event-driven BI and seem to be partnering with SPSS on predictive analytics.

It’s all heating up, yet in the UK it staggers me the number of companies that are not seeing the benefit of these emerging technologies. Some verticals would reap massive benefits by exploiting this technology. If you are interested in Operational BI drop me an email at info@intelligentbusiness.biz

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Operational BI – Extended BI System Or Brand New Architecture?

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

For those of you looking at Operational BI a very common question is how will this use of intelligence impact the classic BI system architecture? To answer this question requires that we first define operational BI. This is the use of intelligence in every-day business operations. We are not talking about running reports that access an operational system here. What we are talking about is much more comprehensive than that. Two major used of BI in operations are:

  • Access to on-demand BI in the context of a process activity
  • Event-driven automatic analysis and decision making

The on-demand use of BI in business operations is about right-time intelligence. This is where a user chooses to perform a specific activity as part of an every-day operational business process and is presented with only the BI that is relevant to help the user perform the task more effectively. It is sometimes referred to as a BI in context™ and is the most precise use of BI. To make that happen typically requires the deployment of BI systems in a service oriented architecture (SOA). In that sense it requires companies to bring together IT professionals responsible for business process management and SOA with IT professionals responsible for BI. Most companies are not yet organised in this way and so will need to mobilise to make this happen. However the impact on the BI system is relatively minimal in that the latest releases of many modern BI platforms today are already service enabled™ i.e. they have web service interfaces to allow on-demand invocation of reports and queries from composite applications, processes and portals. So in this case the BI system per se is really being extended to plug into a SOA and the emphasis is more on re-organising IT to make on-demand BI happen.

However event-driven automatic analysis is a different ball game. In this case we really are stepping outside the classic™ BI system architecture in the sense that this aspect of operational BI is about being able to detect operational events, automatically analyse data and take action well BEFORE the data reaches a BI system. This brings together new technologies such as data streaming, highly parallel in-memory data and rules engines with familiar technologies such as event driven data integration and scoring models built by power users using data mining tools. So if you have event-driven data integration tools already (most ETL tools support this capability) and you already have power users developing predictive models using data mining tools then there is nothing new in these areas. However it is the data streaming, in-memory database (both IBM and Oracle for example have extended their DBMS products by integrating them with in-memory databases) and rules engines that are new. Implementing operational BI in this way is about automating business optimization in every day operations. This kind of automation is operational performance management. So some BI system related technologies are used in this new form of operational performance management while other required technologies are brand new to us. Event-driven business monitoring therefore is a different architecture to a classic BI system because of the need to analyze stream data in memory before it ever reaches a data warehouse. Once analysis has taken place, decisions made and action has been taken it is only then than that event data may well find its way into a BI system via classic data integration processing. So we have to think differently about this. In that sense it would not surprise me if this form of real-time business event monitoring was initiated as a new project with a different architecture outside of a BI team.

In many cases it may well be that this kind of sponsored project is part of a business process management or an RFID initiative rather than being part of a BI program. If this happens it should in my opinion be quickly flagged up and brought under the management of the IT team responsible for BI and Performance Management otherwise the worlds of operational performance management and strategic performance management will never meet. This would be a very disappointing outcome. Frankly, they have to meet because business users need performance management to encompass both the classic strategic performance management (strategy management, scorecards, dashboards, budgeting, planning etc.) AND operational performance management. They need to see what is happening over time in their area of responsibility alongside what is happening right now. Therefore once again we need to keep our eye on the ball regarding project sponsorship, ownership and architecture so that the true benefits of on-demand and event driven operational BI becomes a major contributor to business performance and allows people to leverage intelligence to help them optimize every-day business operations.

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