Title:
From
Business Intelligence to Real-Time Business Intelligence: The
Imperatives and the Guidelines
Abstract: Business Intelligence
(BI) has become a necessity for
companies to succeed or even to survive in today’s highly competitive
and
rapidly changing marketplace. BI enables companies to identify their
strengths
and weaknesses, as well as those of their competitors, allowing them to
better
identify opportunities and threats in the business environment and then
to
adjust their long-term strategies and short-term tactics accordingly.
The
latest generation of BI, real-time BI, allows companies to enhance
real-time decisions and current operations for a broader
group of users. By enabling more people to share “zero-latency”
information,
real-time BI allows companies to take appropriate actions in real-time
when
opportunities or problems are discovered, and thus to maximize revenues
and
minimize costs. For real-time BI to be effective, however, it is
important for
companies to approach the adoption and the ensuing transition period in
an
organized and careful way. This paper first introduces BI, then
discusses the
imperatives of migrating from BI to real-time BI, and finally presents
a set of
guidelines to accomplish it.
Authors: Xihui Zhang, Tao Hu,
Colin Onita and Shane Banks