So far in my column we have looked at the requirement for and a number of approaches to integrating corporate performance management software with business intelligence. Also last month you may have noticed that I published an article called “Corporate Governance – Is Your CFO Standing on A House Of Cards?”. In that article I called for a wake up call on common metadata as a mandatory requirement needed to trust and integrate business intelligence as well as to support applications such as corporate governance for example.

This month I want to take the concept of common metadata further and lay the foundation stones for a very exciting new era in the world of business integration, data warehousing and business intelligence called Intelligent Business.

What is Intelligent Business?

Intelligent business is BI integrated into operational business processes. It is also event driven. There is automatic monitoring of business activity events as well as responding to requests for just-in-time business intelligence which may or may not need to be integrated with other operational data on the fly before delivering this data to applications. It also includes on-demand requests for predictive analysis[1] to provide a recommendation for example. The point here is that business intelligence is not targeted at people such as business analysts for example but targeted at applications within a business process. This concept challenges the traditional approach to BI because it removes the “great divide” between operational and analytical systems so that these systems communicate with each other constantly. The objective is clear, ubiquitous BI in every activity in every business process across the enterprise so as to guide business operations towards achieving strategic business objectives. Hence, Intelligent Business uses BI as an on-demand resource to guide core business operations as the company operates. In most cases the operational business user doesn’t know they are using business intelligence. In other words, BI is just there, transparent but integrated into their normal operational application. Behind the scenes, BI web services make it possible to dynamically integrate with operational systems. In this case, intelligence is used to guide people and systems in the context of the business process activity being performed such that operations are steered towards meeting strategic objectives and goals. In that sense intelligent business requires that a business supports….

All this requires that BI is used as an intelligent resource for on-demand processing in the context of an operational business task being performed in a business process. Therefore, business process activities have to be ‘attached’ to business objectives and goals declared in corporate performance management (CPM) software to help a company align business processes with its business objectives. Once this is done, we can then associate or target BI at specific business process activities so that the BI is used in an operational context to achieve a strategic business objective. At the moment we are finding it difficult just to integrate CPM and BI, let alone integrate CPM and business process management or target BI at a business process activity. Nevertheless these requirements are critical to intelligent business.

Given this description, it is clear that an intelligent business strategy must be based on common trusted intelligence. Also this vision says that the number of requests for BI from people (using BI tools and analytic applications for example) is likely to be dwarfed by the number of requests coming from operational applications being used by front line operations by employees, partners, suppliers or customers. The vast majority of these people in these roles don’t have time to use a BI tool because their job function is real-time and therefore makes it impossible for the user to use such tools. People in these operational roles spend the vast majority of their day dominated by their use of a transaction processing system or by other manual activities. These people could be customer facing staff including customer service representatives in call centres, banking staff in branches at counters, mobile workers such as sales and field service, people in distribution, procurement and even finance people for example. Figure 1 below shows the concept of intelligent business.

Figure 1 The concept of intelligent business

Notice from the above chart that operational applications surround rule driven BI services that access consistent integrated data in data warehouses and data marts. Also the CPM software is not only integrated with BI (as per my previous column articles) but also integrated with business processes so that we know what process activities are associated with what strategic objectives. Through the enterprise portal, people see their alerts, their recommendations, their actions, the on-demand BI that is relevant to their role in the context of any business process activity they are performing at that time. They also see the collaboration tools that they need to do their jobs and collaborate with others.