Operational intelligence
Operational intelligence (OI) is a category of real-time dynamic, business analytics that delivers visibility and insight into data, streaming events and business operations. OI solutions run queries against streaming data feeds and event data to deliver analytic results as operational instructions. OI provides organizations the ability to make decisions and immediately act on these analytic insights, through manual or automated actions.
Purpose[edit]
The purpose of OI is to monitor business activities and identify and detect situations relating to inefficiencies, opportunities, and threats and provide operational solutions. Some definitions define operational intelligence as an event-centric approach to delivering information that empowers people to make better decisions, based on complete and actual information.
In addition, these metrics act as the starting point for further analysis (drilling down into details, performing root cause analysis — tying anomalies to specific transactions and the business activity).
Sophisticated OI systems also provide the ability to associate metadata with metrics, process 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," or "Launch the application that this process steps interacted with."
Different operational intelligence solutions may use many different technologies and be implemented in different ways. This section lists the common features of an operational intelligence solution:
Operational intelligence solutions share many features, and therefore many also share technology components. This is a list of some of the commonly found technology components, and the features they enable:
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 focused products in this area, there are numerous companies in adjacent areas that provide solutions with some OI components.
Operational intelligence integrates information, supporting smarter decision making in time to maximize impact. By correlating a variety of events and data from both streaming feeds and historical data silos, operational intelligence helps organizations gain real-time visibility of information, in context, through dashboards, real-time insight into business performance, health and status so that immediate action based on business policies and processes can be taken. Operational intelligence applies the benefits of real-time analytics, alerts, and actions to a broad spectrum of use cases across and beyond the enterprise.
One specific technology segment is AIDC (Automatic Identification and Data Capture) represented by barcodes, RFID and voice recognition. Another specific technology is the OKAPI platform. It is an Operational Excellence software platform that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide companies with SMART KPIs. The platform then uses data visualization to track the progress of hitting KPIs.