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Business intelligence (BI) applications, which for years have served as useful tools for analysts, statisticians and other number crunchers, have become IT resources that nearly anyone in the enterprise can use.

In recent years, operational BI — which provides reporting and analytics capabilities to people involved in customer service, marketing, sales, fulfillment and shipping, finance, line-of-business management, and other day-to-day operations — has emerged as a powerful corporate resource to help workers make more informed business decisions and aid organizations in improving performance.

“For most of its history, BI has been separate from operational processes,” says David Stodder, an analyst at Ventana Research. “People have used traditional BI to query data, analyze trends and do what-if kind of thinking. But now, in a call center, for example, organizations want to give agents and call center managers more information about customers, related products and services, credit histories, and so forth so that the agent on the phone with a customer can guide the interaction appropriately. Or, for a manager in a supply chain, the company would like to provide timely [information] about inventory, product development status, alternative suppliers and so on.”

Often the information in operational BI is provided in real time from a data source such as an enterprise data warehouse. The fact that data is delivered so quickly enables people to make fast — yet well-informed — decisions based on the latest available information.

The data provided in operational BI often is granular; users can get detailed information on specific functions or transactions. It can also be aggregated, so users such as sales managers, line-of-business vice presidents and senior executives can view broader customer, business and market trends and performance indicators.

Operational BI can have a direct impact on processes such as sales and manufacturing. For example, a sales executive could use BI software to view information about customers, demand for specific products over a period of time and general market trends — then run reports showing which products are selling well in different regions. Production managers could use the data to adjust manufacturing levels based on demand. And marketing managers could leverage the information to improve promotional campaigns.

Some of the more recent BI offerings are Web-based, so it’s not overly expensive to provide reports or interactive analytical programs to many people in an organization — in some cases hundreds and even thousands of users. Vendors have also broadened their BI platforms to include better aggregation and integration of data from multiple resources, helping to support operational BI.

One recent trend among vendors has been to link BI products to online search capabilities, which help users find specific reports or information. For example, they can quickly locate relevant information pertaining to a particular customer from reports, dashboards and data warehouses used in the organization.

And there’s an ongoing effort to make it simpler for users to access relevant information. “Through easier-to-use interfaces such as dashboards, companies are creating tools for a wide population of users to see business-performance metrics and key performance indicators, and to let them run ‘canned,’ prearranged queries,” says Stodder. “In other words, rather than providing full BI applications to hundreds or thousands of additional users, companies are expanding access to the ‘fruits’ of BI analysis.”

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