Deploying Pervasive Business Intelligence: Raison D’être

Abstract

Evi dence of the competitive value of business intelligence

(B I) and analytics solutions is growing. BI and data ware- house (DW) tools and analytic applications. a set of tech- nologies and processes that IDC refers to as business ana- lytics . are being deployed to support decision making. An increasing number of organizations are making BI func- tionality more pervasively available to all decision makers, be they executives, staff employees, managers, or suppliers. But having BI be pervasively available in an organization means much more than distributing reports to all stake- holders. In some cases, BI solutions are deployed to auto- mate an existing way of making decisions. In other cases, BI solutions are deployed to change the way decisions are made. The change involves moving from decision making in which the variables that go into the decision are unar- ticulated and estimated to decision making in which the variables are articulated and supported by historical val- ues. This point highlights the importance of defining perva- sive BI as more than dissemination of information to all. It is quite possible that using BI with incorrectly specified models or misunderstood data is worse than not using BI in the first place. In this study we will examine how different Critical Success Factors address various issues that may hinder/help the success of a Pervasive BI and different modern BI technologies with respect to the paper named

“Critical Success Factor Deploying Pervasive BI” by James Markarian, Stephen Brobst and Jeff Bedell.. The study will have a long lasting impact as it will act as a landmark in providing in-depth knowledge and analysis on pervasive Business Intelligence.

Keywords

Active Data warehouse, Business Intelligence, Business Process Management and Business Rule Engines, Service Level Agree- ment, Business Activity Monitoring

INTRODUCTION

During the process of decision making not only managers are involved but employees, customers and partners also play a vital role for increasing business value. Pervasive BI has the objective and ability of making back-end data available to all employees of an enterprise to gain optimum performance. As the concept of Pervasive BI has evolved, therefore new framework is required to represent flow of information from various resources. There are several critical success factors that support pervasive BI success or failure. Blended data is delivered by means of this approach.

All operations of data integration, data loading and data optimiza- tion were carried out to support reporting procedures. With the increase in ad-hoc reporting demands of managers, new reporting tools are necessary for businesses. Now managers require analyti- cal functionality and information styles. Before the advent of modern technological tools such as BI, managers had to rely on pre-defined reports for analysis purposes. It was the responsibility of backend programmers and planners to analyze demands of managers and then they produce on-demand reports. Business processes need to be automated through modern concepts of Business Activity Monitoring, Business Process Management and Business Rule Engines.

It offers multiple ways for improving data analysis and decision making procedures. Apart from this various other reasons have derived the requirement of real-time information to make smarter decisions. In order to gain competitive advantage, companies had to adopt BI applications. There are a lot of companies which are using BI for their businesses. This is one of the ways to enhance revenues and cost efficiencies of businesses.

There are certain steps which are required to build a suitable or- ganizational culture for BI solutions. i.e. educating people, con- vincing IT architects and developers, proper awareness of BI tools, trainings. However, BI should be capable of analyzing whole data and to provide timely information through appropriate applications. There should be a key person who will manage changes in organization before and after deploying BI solutions because BI evolves the whole enterprise thinking. BI projects are incremental in nature so all changes should be monitored and reflected in an appropriate way. All activities should be synchro- nized with business processes in order to provide right latency and recent data updates. BI is composed of many subprojects spanned over a time period of many years, therefore, whole archi- tecture should be well-integrated and capable of incorporating changes.

The pervasive BI and overlapping of operational system can be described in the following Figure 1 [1]

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Figure 1. Overlapping areas of Pervasive BI and Operational

System