In an earlier post I wrote about the basic differences between operational BI and classic BI (read the post).  In this post, I’m going to explore the differences between operational reporting and operational business intelligence.  This is a hot topic in the world of Business Intelligence.

Operational reporting is generally managed by the teams who are most familiar with the applications that capture the operational data.  Typically, the operational applications provide their own reporting and the capability of making slight adjustments to the reports.  This follows the typical process:  an employee enters data to an application, the application provides that data at a later time in the form of a report.  This is very typically operational reporting.   At any business there could be one application that tracks customers, leads, prospects; another application tracks timesheets; and another one tracks the warehouse shipments.   These applications are very good at reporting on the process they are tracking.  The downside is that there are multiple places that an end user has to visit to get these separate reports.  This is operational reporting.

Operational business intelligence is about bringing the data from these separat operational applications onto a single platform, unifying and sharing data when it makes sense (an employee table for example) and providing reports.  The data from the applications is refreshed on a regular schedule throughout the day – every hour, twice a day—and is analyzed.  Reports are then pushed to the end users based on how the metrics are performing compared to business rule thresholds.   These reports are typically very specific and provide the end user with an action that needs to be taken rather than presenting the end user with the requested data set from the single application reporting site.  This is operational Business Intelligence.