Executive Summary

Right-Time Business Intelligence Optimizing the Business Decision Cycle

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Right-time business intelligence (BI) is all about delivering the right information in the right format to the right people at the right time for decision-making purposes. Right-time business intelligence optimizes ("right-sizes") the time latency between when a business event occurs and when an appropriate action is taken. In business intelligence, this usually means shortening the overall decision cycle. There are three segments of BI latency: data latency, analysis latency and action latency.

Right-time business intelligence encompasses any BI data collection, analysis, or action that falls between once-a-day and real-time. Right-time business intelligence is used to run an organization's daily business with the ability to modify the business intra-day.

In this report, we present case studies describing five progressive organizations that have implemented right-time BI solutions to improve the effectiveness of business decisions. Each is a customer of a sponsor of this report: Bostik, Ltd. (DataMirror); Pfizer Global Pharmaceuticals (IBM); Shopzilla (Sybase); Galosi (Syncsort); and Continental Airlines (Teradata).

Right-time BI applications have evolved over time to focus on operational business intelligence, the integration of BI functionality within day-to-day business operations. Technologies for this include near real-time updates of data-warehouse data from operational systems and the packaging of BI capabilities as services available on demand.

One area we explored with customers was understanding the key steps in implementing a right-time BI solution. Responses included obtaining the right resources to start, selecting the right partners, getting top management support, maintaining flexibility in project scope, cleaning up the accuracy of operational systems, getting the data and metadata structures right, making clear decisions about what data needs to be captured in right-time, delivering a robust solution, effectively managing data updates and planning for success.

Benefits of right-time BI solutions were impressive-enhanced business information, improved data integrity, the ability to optimize business functions and more efficient management of a BI environment. All of these customers identified a significant improvement in ROI.

For all of these customers, current right-time BI solutions provide a solid platform for future enhancements to extend the value beyond the current implementation. Examples include extending the BI environment to other areas within the company and to third-party data sources, creating additional common services, exploring new BI platforms, and moving toward more real-time data updates.

Emerging trends are centralized BI environments and a single view of the business; encapsulating business logic and organizational structure in BI metadata that can be changed to reflect changes in the business; and encapsulating BI functions as common, reusable services. The study results highlight the significance of right-time business intelligence an important operational system, which adds value to the business.

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