Should Business Intelligence Be ‘Real-Time’?

I recently came across a couple of articles on adtmag.com that are probably worth taking a look at.

First up is an article by Jack Vaughan entitled "Dash on real-time, BI and the road ahead". Mainly an interview with Jnan Dash, ex-Oracle and IBM and now an advocate of the 'real time enterprise'. According to the article;

"Dash tells technologists discerning risk-reward here to visualize two circles sitting side by side. One circle represents operational and transactional elements such as ERP, CRM and mainframe data. The other circle represents a snapshot of data, and this represents the data warehouse or analytical sphere. As these two circles move to partially overlap, suggests Dash, the real-time enterprise appears.

It is the frequency of the refresh of the analytical snapshot that defines the amount of real-time involved. A company pursuing a strategy like Wal-Mart s may have to opt for what Dash calls extreme crispness in its snapshot. Others may rightly decide day-old data will do for certain functions."

The article itself links to another one, by Tony Baer, entitled "Analyzing data in real time", which is probably the more useful of the two. The article asks the question:

"In recent years, business intelligence systems have played pivotal roles in helping organizations to fine-tune business goals such as improving customer retention, market penetration, profitability and efficiency.

In most cases, these insights are driven by analyses of historic data. Therefore, it is human nature to pose the next logical question: If historic data can help us make better decisions going forward, could real-time data improve decision making here and now?"

The answer, of course, is yes and no, but take a look at the article for a few examples of where real time analysis make the differences, and where it just adds complexity to a project without actually adding any value.