Abstract:

Business Intelligence (BI) has become a necessity for companies to succeed or even to survive in today’s highly competitive and rapidly changing marketplace. BI enables companies to identify their strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of their competitors, allowing them to better identify opportunities and threats in the business environment and then to adjust their long-term strategies and short-term tactics accordingly. The latest generation of BI, real-time BI, allows companies to enhance real-time decisions and current operations for a broader group of users. By enabling more people to share “zero-latency” information, real-time BI allows companies to take appropriate actions in real-time when opportunities or problems are discovered, and thus to maximize revenues and minimize costs. For real-time BI to be effective, however, it is important for companies to approach the adoption and the ensuing transition period in an organized and careful way. This paper first introduces BI, then discusses the imperatives of migrating from BI to real-time BI, and finally presents a set of guidelines to accomplish it.