|
Enabling The Real-Time Enterprise
(Continued from Page 1)
|
|
|
When effectively architected and implemented, the real-time enterprise can improve critical business initiatives and processes. For example:
- Compliance issues and accountability – the RTE provides a fluid environment that allows for an up-to-the-minute view of financial health, which includes event-based alerts that will identify conditions that have a material adverse effect on the business. Additionally, it enables companies to ensure that they’re nimble enough to comply with new business laws or industry standard practices as they emerge.
- Value chain collaboration and straight-through processing – the RTE can help companies build relationships with customers and partners by making real-time information, such as account activity, order status, alerts to order status changes, or availability of items immediately accessible to them. Additionally, the RTE provides for streamlining of the actual back-end processes required to complete a business transaction, allowing them to leverage real-time data in order to execute in a timely fashion.
- Mergers and acquisitions – companies that follow a real-time enterprise model will create an agile infrastructure that will reduce the time, cost and risk of assimilating acquired companies, and make it easy to gain complete visibility into the new company by quickly incorporating new data sources into reports. By raising the level of abstraction, new business applications that isolate the target company’s systems from change while seamlessly integrating the new company’s systems with established processes can be quickly developed and assembled.
There are several key solution areas that are required to build a real-time enterprise. These are not bleeding-edge projects that depend upon the risky early adoption of technology. Nor do they rely on the deployment of a monolithic technology platform that carries a huge up-front cost. Established, practical enterprise business intelligence suites and enterprise application integration solutions form the cornerstone of the RTE. Companies can embrace and build real-time solutions incrementally, realizing value each step of the way.
Enterprise Business Intelligence and Performance Management
Enterprise business intelligence unlocks data buried in operational systems, and accelerates the flow of information across an extended enterprise. While many businesses are using it as a means of gaining insight and making better decisions at a tactical level, few have taken the necessary steps to realize its full potential. In order to be a key enabler of the real-time enterprise, a business intelligence solution must become ubiquitous by providing comprehensive data access, incorporating both staged and live data when required, delivering appropriate levels of information to anyone in the enterprise regardless of level or role, allowing users to manipulate data in reports to reach further conclusions, and scaling to accommodate an increasing number of users.
|
|
|
|
|
