Real-time business intelligence

Real-time business intelligence (RTBI) is a concept describing the process of delivering business intelligence (BI) or information about business operations as they occur. Real time means near to zero latency and access to information whenever it is required.

The speed of today's processing systems has moved classical data warehousing into the realm of real-time. The result is real-time business intelligence. Business transactions as they occur are fed to a real-time BI system that maintains the current state of the enterprise. The RTBI system not only supports the classic strategic functions of data warehousing for deriving information and knowledge from past enterprise activity, but it also provides real-time tactical support to drive enterprise actions that react immediately to events as they occur. As such, it replaces both the classic data warehouse and the enterprise application integration (EAI) functions. Such event-driven processing is a basic tenet of real-time business intelligence.

In this context, "real-time" means a range from milliseconds to a few seconds (5s) after the business event has occurred. While traditional BI presents historical data for manual analysis, RTBI compares current business events with historical patterns to detect problems or opportunities automatically. This automated analysis capability enables corrective actions to be initiated and/or business rules to be adjusted to optimize business processes.

RTBI is an approach in which up-to-a-minute data is analyzed, either directly from operational sources or feeding business transactions into a real time data warehouse and Business Intelligence system.

RTBI analyzes real time data. As such, it makes sense for some time-critical decisions, but not necessarily for developing long-term business strategies. With high consumer expectations in the competitive market, decisions that are based on the most current data available improve customer relationships, increase revenue, maximize operational efficiency. Real-time business intelligence systems mainly provide the information necessary to tactical take advantage of events as they occur.

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