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7 Simple Rules For Successful Real-Time Business Intelligence Implementation
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Corporate dashboards are becoming the “must have” business intelligence technology for executives and business users across corporate America. Dashboard solutions have been around for over a decade, but have recently seen a resurgence in popularity due to the advance of enabling business intelligence and integration technologies. This paper discusses how to create an effective operational dashboard and some of the associated design best practices.
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Real-time data marts and business intelligence solutions are no longer a novelty or luxury. These solutions are not in their infancy stage. They are becoming instrumental in delivering information crucial for organizations to remain competitive in their core businesses. Given the number of tools mushrooming over the past few years touting anything from ready-to-go solutions on day one to analytical ability on-the-fly and on-demand, real-time business intelligence solutions appear to be a piece-of-cake. However, the reality often reveals a different picture than one might imagine!
What challenges can you face when you consider a Real-time Business Intelligence solution for your organization? The most obvious challenges may include the following:
- Ability to provide analytical information with superior performance while refreshing the data marts real-time.
- Justification of cost versus benefits for real-time business intelligence.
- Impact on performance of one or more source applications.
- Ability to perform all of the transformations in the ETL (Extract, Transform Load) process in real-time.
Well, these responses are not incorrect. However, they are only a small part of the total answer. During the implementation of a real-time business intelligence solution, we realize that the biggest challenges include more than just issues around tools or technologies. So what are the challenges, and, correspondingly, what rules should you follow?
Be careful in defining “real-time”
In absolute terms, there is no such thing as a truly real-time business intelligence solution! Paradoxically, the term real-time business intelligence is not just some industry hype! The definition of “real-time” is relative to an organization’s critical information needs. For some organizations, real-time response may be defined as “within-a-minute”, while for other organizations working in situations where instantaneous response is required it may be as small as a few milliseconds. For any given scenario, do not forget to include the time it takes to capture changes in the source system, perform ETL processes and cache frequently accessed reports. Every step in this entire cycle introduces overhead in overall response time. Considering the time taken in each step of data integration and presentation the solution will almost always be accurately called “near real-time”. However, most such business intelligence solutions usually deal with information needs that are up-to-the minute or delayed by at most a few minutes. For all practical purposes, there is nothing wrong in labeling them “real-time”.
The greater challenge lies in managing the expectations of user communities from the beginning of the implementation. It is essential to ensure that everybody is on the same page when defining “real-time”.
Differentiate between “must-be-real-time”, “nice-to-have
real-time” and “not-at-all-real-time”
It is difficult to avoid the misconception that every single piece of information in a real-time data mart has to be refreshed in “real-time”. While most of the information delivered by a real-time business intelligence solution may be categorized as absolute real-time, not all pieces of the puzzle need to be laid out in real-time. You can, rather you must, differentiate between subject areas and/or information elements which are required to be available in an absolute real-time manner from those that can be fulfilled with a daily, weekly, or even a monthly refresh frequency.
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Oracle #1 in Business Analytics According to IDC Research
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The Business Intelligence Search Engine has all the answers.
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Find all you need on The Business Intelligence Search Engine.
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