I’m sure you’ve heard the term “operational business intelligence” thrown around by the water cooler.  My guess is you’re not quite sure what it is; I’m here to help you understand.  I’ll assume that you have a working knowledge of business intelligence and the role it plays in an organization (if not, read one of the earlier blogs about Business Intelligence).  What follows is a comparison of the typical BI application compared to the typical operational BI application.

In a nutshell, operational BI employs the same classic business intelligence methods to manage and optimize daily business processes.  Classic business intelligence uses tactical, strategic and predictive analytics to assist upper management with business decisions.  The reports from a classic BI system analyze data and identify trends; it does this on multiple levels – customer, company, factory, or product – and it enables strategic decision making to continue positive trends and curb negative trends.  Operational BI, on the other hand, uses the same tactical, strategic and predictive analytics but does so at the business process level and delivers information to the frontline workers who then take action to improve the process.  These improvements then lead to the desired trend that is then reported on in classic BI reports.  Operational BI improves or even steers an operational process while the process is still ongoing while classic BI reflects the trends at the end of the process.

Below is a comparison that helps illustrate the differences:

Hopefully this helps answer some of your questions about operational business intelligence.  Organizations that are able to successfully support both a classic and an operational BI system will maximize their business performance.   These organizations will improve processes before they lead to negative trends which in turn saves time and money; two critical success factors.