Real-time business intelligence
Real-time business intelligence (RTBI) is a concept describing the process of delivering
The speed of today's processing systems has allowed typical data warehousing to work in real-time. The result is real-time business intelligence. Business transactions as they occur are fed to a real-time BI system that maintains the current state of the enterprise. The RTBI system not only supports the classic strategic functions of data warehousing for deriving information and knowledge from past enterprise activity, but it also provides real-time tactical support to drive enterprise actions that react immediately to events as they occur. As such, it replaces both the classic data warehouse and the enterprise application integration (EAI) functions. Such event-driven processing is a basic tenet of real-time business intelligence.
In this context, "real-time" means a range from
RTBI is an approach in which up-to-a-minute data is analyzed, either directly from operational sources or feeding business transactions into a real time data warehouse and Business Intelligence system.
Latency
All real-time business intelligence systems have some latency, but the goal is to minimize the time from the business event happening to a corrective action or notification being initiated. Analyst Richard Hackathorn describes three types of latency:[2]
- Data latency; the time taken to collect and store the data
- Analysis latency; the time taken to analyze the data and turn it into actionable information
- Action latency; the time taken to react to the information and take action
Real-time business intelligence technologies are designed to reduce all three latencies to as close to zero as possible, whereas traditional business intelligence only seeks to reduce data latency and does not address analysis latency or action latency since both are governed by manual processes.
Some commentators have introduced the concept of right time business intelligence which proposes that information should be delivered just before it is required, and not necessarily in real-time.
Architectures
Event-based
Real-time Business Intelligence systems are
Data warehouse
An alternative approach to event driven architectures is to increase the refresh cycle of an existing data warehouse to update the data more frequently. These real-time data warehouse systems can achieve near real-time update of data, where the data latency typically is in the range from minutes to hours. The analysis of the data is still usually manual, so the total latency is significantly different from event driven architectural approaches.
Server-less technology
The latest alternative innovation to "real-time" event driven and/or "real-time" data warehouse architectures is
Process-aware
This is sometimes considered a subset of
Technologies that support real-time analytics
Technologies that can be supported to enable real-time business intelligence are
- Data warehouse appliance
- Data warehouse appliance is a combination of hardware and software product which was designed exclusively for analytical processing. In data warehouse implementation, tasks that involve tuning, adding or editing structure around the data, data migration from other databases, reconciliation of data are done by DBA. Another task for DBA was to make the database to perform well for large sets of users. Whereas with data warehouse appliances, it is the vendor responsibility of the physical design and tuning the software as per hardware requirements. Data warehouse appliance package comes with its own operating system, storage, DBMS, software, and required hardware. If required data warehouse appliances can be easily integrated with other tools.
- Mobile technology
- There are very limited vendors for providing Mobile business intelligence; MBI is integrated with existing BI architecture. MBI is a package that uses existing BI applications so people can use on their mobile phone and make informed decision in real time.
Application areas
- Fraud detection
- Systems monitoring
- Application performance monitoring
- Customer Relationship Management
- Demand sensing
- Dynamic pricing and yield management
- Data validation
- Operational intelligence and risk management
- Payments & cash monitoring
- Data security monitoring
- Supply chain optimization
- sensor networkdata analysis
- Workstreaming
- Call center optimization
- Enterprise Mashupsand Mashup Dashboards
- Transportation
See also
- Business Intelligence
- Complex Event Processing
- Digital Nervous System
References
- S2CID 15523928.
- ^ Richard Hackathorn (February 2004). "The BI Watch Real-Time to Real-Value".
External links
- Complex Event Processing & Real Time Intelligence - Introduction to Real-Time Intelligence