Operational Intelligence
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Operational Intelligence (OI) focuses on optimizing business processes by identifying patterns of execution and bottlenecks in the processes, and how exceptional business events affect the processes.
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[edit] Features
The purpose of OI is to track the efficiency of business processes and identify inefficiencies, opportunities, and threats. OI helps quantify:
- the efficiency of the business processes,
- how the IT infrastructure and unexpected events affect the business processes (resource bottlenecks, system failures, events external to the company, etc.)
- how the execution of the business processes contribute to revenue gains or losses.
This is achieved by observing the progress of the business processes and computing several metrics in real-time using these progress events and publishing the metrics to one or more channels (e.g., a dashboard that can display the metrics as charts and graphs, autonomic software that can receive these updates and fine-tune the processes in real-time, email, mobile, and messaging systems that can notify users, and so on). Thresholds can also be placed on these metrics to create notifications or new events.
In addition, these metrics act as the starting point for further analysis (drilling down into details, performing root cause analysis - tying anamolies to specific transactions and of the business process).
Sophisticated OI systems also provide the ability to associate metadata with metrics, proces steps, channels, etc. With this, it becomes easy to get related information, e.g., 'retrieve the contact information of the person that manages the application that executed the step in the business transaction that took 60% more time than the norm," or "view the acceptance/rejection trend for the customer who was denied approval in this transaction," "Launch the application that this process step interacted with."
[edit] Comparision with Business Intelligence
OI is often linked to or compared with Business Intelligence (BI), in the sense that both help make sense out of large amounts of information. But there are some basic differences: OI is primarily process-centric, whereas BI is primarily data-centric. (As with most technologies, each of these could be sub-optimally coerced to perform the other's task.) OI is, by definition real-time, unlike BI which is traditionally an after-the-fact and report-based approach to identifying patterns.
[edit] Technology Components
Just as business intelligence uses technologies such as multi-dimensional models, data mining, data warehouses, etc., OI is built upon several components:
- Complex Event Processing (CEP)
- Low-latency real-time dashboards for different user roles
- Industry-specific dashboards
- Dashboard customization and personalization
- Multi-channel publishing and notification
- Metadata framework to model and link events to resources
- Multi-dimensional analysis
- Root cause analysis
- Time Series and trending operations
- Multi-protocol event collection probes
[edit] Companies and Products
Operational Intelligence is a relatively new market segment (compared to the more mature business intelligence and business process management segments). In addition to companies that produce dedicated and focussed products in this area, there are numerous companies in adjacent areas that provide solutions with some OI components.
[edit] Business Intelligence Companies
Several of the leading business intelligence companies (Business Objects, Cognos, Oracle) are in the process of adding 'real-time' capabilities to their existing products to enable them to participate in the OI market.
[edit] System Management Companies
- Systar—Started mainly as an IT system monitoring product, but now provides a set of products focused on the infrastructure aspect of OI.
- IBM (Tivoli)—IBM's Business Performance Management capabilities include a standard Common Business Event infrastructure to define, publish and subscribe to business events. Recently, it has also been a participant in the complex event processing standards and initiatives.
[edit] Complex Event Processing Companies
These focus on the complex event processing aspect of OI (processing discrete events to produce metrics) and are not specifically designed to be process-centric (though this could be achieved somewhat by using the complex event algebra operators). To provide a complete OI solution, they partner with a dashboard provider (or sometimes leave it as an exercise for the user).
- Coral8—Based on Stanford University's DB Streams project. Coral8 provides the notion of streams and steam operators that define how records in the source stream are morphed into records of the target stream. A SQL-like language called 'continuous query language' is used to define streams and operators.
- Streambase—Was created out of the Aurora and Borealis projects at Massachusetts Institute of Technology based on the concept of an active database. (Traditional databases store data records and receive queries to manipulate the records. Active databases store queries persistently and receive data record streams, and apply these queries on the received data to produce 'output' record streams.)
- Progress Software's Apama—Is a high performance CEP engine that is targeted towards high speed, high volume event processing such as alogorithmic trading in the stock market.
[edit] End to End OI Product Companies
These companies provide all or most of the OI features and components in a single product.
- Celequest—Provides a simple OI product that provides multi-dimensional analysis, but lacks things like root cause analysis, rich widgets and enterprise features such as high availability. (Celequest was recently acquired by business intelligence vendor Cognos.)
- Syndera—Provides a combined process-centric and a discrete (non-process) complex event processing OI system. Supports dashboards, alerts, trends, root cause analysis, industry-specific dashboards, and multiple channels of notification.
[edit] Middleware Companies
These companies typically provide a Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) product that has several OI capabilities. These products are typically closely tied to the company's own middleware infrastructure:
- IBM (WebSphere)—WebSphere Business Monitor
- Tibco—BusinessFactor, OpsFactor.
- Oracle—Part of the Oracle Fusion middleware platform.
