Iken | Demystifying intelligence

To survive in hyper competitive world, every organization whether it is small or big is looking to make sense of information generated and effective use of precious organizational knowledge available to do better business, customer service and risk management. Since existing operational information systems focus on automating business processes, these do not have capabilities of intelligence, knowledge automation and decision support. Obviously, organizations look for solutions to these problems in variety of other technologies such as data warehousing, data mining and knowledge management which comes at a cost and time. These may not be affordable by many. There are many organizations where volume of data is not that too large to built data warehouse and have data mining technology.

Organizations are moving towards enterprise solutions which use common operational database, data in this operational database itself can be used for real-time, agile, decision support and operational intelligence in distributed fashion rather than building separate data warehouses and doing analysis on reactive basis.

Most of the software vendors who provide operational information systems like ERP, CBS, operational-CRM and independent functional information systems such as human resource management, learning management systems, inventory management, billing systems concentrate on automating well defined business processes and lack intelligence and decision support capabilities. Client organizations of such systems have to look for BI, decision support and analytics systems separately, derive intelligence out of them and integrate into operational systems. Having built-in intelligence, decision support systems and knowledge automation in such software products can definitely value-add to products and thereby to their clients. Business intelligence, analytical and decision support systems at tactical and top level need not be looked separately from that of operational and reporting systems. These can be very much part and parcel of overall information systems to have intelligence at every level for every one.

Customizing, integrating and automating such intelligence and knowledge in operational business systems may be a challenge, which may involve extensive data analysis and modeling (e.g. using techniques of data mining), and integrating results into operational systems etc. Also, systems such as transactions processing in banking and telecom need automated and configured intelligence on ongoing basis to determine customer and transaction risk associated on dynamic and real-time basis instead of one-time or on periodic basis. Specific intelligence based on requirement can be built, configured and automated on top of operational database management systems.