Integration Matters

In this exclusive interview with Information Builders Magazine, iWay Marketing Director Jake Freivald discusses the important role that integration technology plays in today's operational business intelligence systems.

IB MAGAZINE: What's the difference between Operational BI and Analytical BI?

FREIVALD: Analytical BI systems generally access a data warehouse. They give users an excellent view of past business events and entities, but not of actual business processes, which are ongoing. Operational business intelligence systems give users a real-time view of business events as they occur, such as orders being shipped, parts being routed through an assembly line, or the activities of a customer service rep.

IB MAGAZINE: Why is integration technology so important to Operational BI?

FREIVALD: Integration technology is important to both types of BI systems, but in different ways. Traditional or analytical BI applications rely on extract, transform and load (ETL) tools to keep a data repository current, perhaps once a day or once a week. Today's organizations not only want to extract information from these warehouses, they also need to react to that information as part of an automated workflow process. To do that, they must be able to access operational data from production systems. That's where OBI comes in. OBI systems have built-in integration capabilities that can detect or "listen" for events, read and enrich messages, and automatically create human-readable documents. Alerts tell the BI application to take action.

IB MAGAZINE: So it's primarily a difference of latency?

FREIVALD: Yes. Operational BI involves rapidly correlating information that is part of work-in-process, right now. It doesn't happen as part of a nightly batch feed, and it isn't necessarily triggered by something a user initiates, like querying a database. It's much more proactive. In some cases, users are asked to supply input, perhaps to correlate events with data obtained from other parts of the business process. In that sense, OBI is a lot like Business Activity Monitoring [BAM] because you are trying to make your transactions more intelligent and your intelligence more transactional.

IB MAGAZINE: Which parts of the iWay product set apply to OBI systems?

FREIVALD: iWay Adapter Manager – formerly known as iXTE – is a key technology component because it enables you to listen for events, detect them, propagate them, and determine what actions to take as a result of them. It helps you harness information to make decisions.

IB MAGAZINE: Does querying operational information rather than data warehouse information give you a more accurate view of the business?

FREIVALD: The issue isn't accuracy, it's usefulness. When supporting operations, I need a single set of services to help execute my business processes. Normally those processes are driven from my operational systems. A warehouse still provides history and context, but that "single view of the truth" is subordinate to my operational systems. In traditional analytic BI, it's the other way around, and I have to subordinate my operational systems to the historical and contextual requirements of the warehouse.

IB MAGAZINE: Does this make operational BI systems germane for meeting regulatory compliance issues?

FREIVALD: Yes, in some cases, OBI systems can remove the latency from the examination of a business process. In any audit, you want to make sure that information that crosses your desk is also reported to the auditors who are checking the validity of your decisions. In other words, you need to be sure that the business process uses the same numbers as your reports.

IB MAGAZINE: How are BI tools changing to accommodate these operationally oriented systems?

FREIVALD: Most business intelligence vendors are still focused on the data layer rather than the application layer. Within the operational context, the BI tools should be able to incorporate EAI technology and middleware to create a service-oriented architecture that enables general connectivity among many different applications. The tools should also support triggers and alerts so the BI process can interface with transaction systems and be triggered by events occurring in those systems. For example, a trigger can cause a message to be sent when a predefined threshold is reached, such as when inventory falls below a certain level or new sales figures are available. Finally, you want tools that can both query and update databases so users can intervene and supply input, as WebFOCUS users can do with WebFOCUS Maintain.

IB MAGAZINE: So, in essence, OBI systems help computers and people collaborate…

FREIVALD: True. What you are doing is taking what people do well – figuring stuff out, being creative, learning new things – and mapping it to the activities that computers do well, like executing repetitive tasks and storing data. With OBI, you are able to tap into both sides of that equation.