The Real-Time Enterprise and the Right-Time Business Intelligence

In the beginning of Business Intelligence, a several years ago, when the BI projects were defined only to use in the strategy level, the data warehouse was normally updated monthly, and sometimes weekly, in some specific areas.

Nowadays, the companies need to make decisions quickly, and with the expansion of BI for operational applications, update the data warehouse has become increasingly in near real time.

We are in the era of real-time enterprise, and the data need to be updated according to the business requirements, in some cases, less than a second after after a business event has happened in a transactional system.

The process to get information almost without latency in the business event is called Real-Time Business Intelligence and the process to delivery information when it is required is called Right-time Business Intelligence. The difference is Right-Time BI can not be necessarily in real time.

Although the latency depends of the kind of business, and all BI systems have some latency, it is important define which time is better to update the Data Warehouse, that can be less than a second, seconds, minutes, hours or daily, according to serve the business requirements. For define this time, you should know that as more you reduce the time of data latency, you will reduce the time to take action.

Some areas where is very interesting to apply the concepts of Real-Time BI are: financial markets (stock exchange), fraud detection, application performance monitoring and risk management.

Some kinds of application don't need of real-time BI, because don't need to update the data warehouse frequently. There are cases where if you implement the Real-Time BI, this will be a hindrance, because the data updated quickly can affect the analysis. For example, a sales application where the customers normally emit orders once a week, if you update the data warehouse daily, and try to analyze the results in 3 or 4 days, you can make wrong decisions, because sometimes several orders are emitted in the last days of the week.

I think the concept of Right-Time BI is comprehensive and interesting, you delivery information when it is required, being real time or not.

P.S. - The term Right-Time Business Intelligence was coined by Colin White, in a report of The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI), entitled “Building the Real-Time Enterprise”.