The Pervasive Business Intelligence

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

McKendrick refers to it as "BI for the masses" because it aims at facilitating a holistic enterprise-wide provision of data, offer tools and dashboards to perform real-time analysis, as well as making it available through web and mobile services to all employees of an organization.

Making use of a BI system is becoming less of a luxury and more of a matter of survival in order to become a successful enterprise (Chaudhuri et al., 2011).

Pervasive business intelligence refers to the evolved version of traditional business intelligence; which is made up of strategic and tactical business intelligence plus operational business intelligence (E. Turban & L. Volonino, 2012, pg. 326). This evolutionary transition follows the recent trends in BI offerings from vendors and its adoption among organizations. Both parties focus on making BI available to employees at all levels; be it strategic, managerial or operational.

Pervasive business intelligence also focuses on making insightful and actionable information available in two directions across any organization. They are vertical (top - down) and horizontal (cross-departmental).

PBI proposes to move the proprietary administration of BI infrastructure and tools from the IT department to the general populace in an enterprise. It bridges the gap between IT staff and managerial staff while also enabling operational staff to benefit from analyzed insights.

This is aimed at solving the problematic issue of department or business unit silos which are common in traditional BI implementations.

Pervasive BI adoption has been

2. CRITERIA TO SATISFY PERVASIVENESS OF A BI IMPLEMENTATION

What makes business intelligence 'pervasive'? It could be considered as the ability of an organization to

integrate and provide enterprise and transactional data across all departments,

provide the tools, architecture and services to perform real-time analysis on operational and warehoused data,

provide these tools through singular dashboards or embedded in legacy systems,

provide these tools and services at optimal uptime through secured networks,

provide specific insightful or otherwise new information that is actionable to the right user,

in order to provide facts and knowledge aiding decision-making in the organization.

We shall discuss in depth the various criteria qualifying a Pervasive BI system.

It must be collaborative through enterprise-wide implementation

BI must be implemented on an enterprise level for it to be considered pervasive. It should diminish the occurrence of siloed data in departmental BI implementations across an organization. It should provide insights to all employees at all levels of the enterprise furnishing them with timely information as they are needed.

Pervasive BI must extend beyond the enterprise by incorporating external users such as partners and customers. It improves the realization of crowd-sourcing ventures, highly responsive supply chain management, real-time inventory monitoring and control, improved self-service.

It must be simple to use

Dashboards and analytical tools should be simple enough for information managers as well as frontline operational staff to use. It should be simple for the information manager to monitor and analyze data to uncover insights, find and generate reports, plan, query and provide informed predictions from BI dashboards or through embedded access. It should also be simple for field staff to monitor and drill into real-time data in order to be more productive through higher responsivity rates on their jobs.

It must provide near real-time data analysis

Pervasive BI should operate at a minimal latency and lag time for data access, analysis and insights provision to its users i.e. it should provide timely insights on-the-fly at optimal speeds.

This near real-time data availability must exist through the implementation or optimization of a highly responsive Active Data Warehouse (ADW) through event-based processing technologies. The ADW must be designed and optimized to satisfy best-in-class standards, rules and techniques to manage data storage.

It must offer freshness of data at all times

In a pervasive BI implementation, data gathered from sources must be stored in storage formats that must obey increased atomicity and granularity standards. It should also be stored in an Active Data Warehouse (ADW), which should guarantee that fresh views generated from the warehoused operational data. The Active Data Warehouse should enable pervasive BI tasks to follow an incremental and constant ongoing process as fresh data is created. This subsequently improves the efficiency of Active Data Warehouse refresh ratios through Extract-Transform-Load(ETL) technologies.

It must provide high data quality in storage and subsequent information outputs

The data churned and analyzed by pervasive BI systems must be of high quality. This is essential because organizations in the past have shown to have different opinions from the fairly similar datasets by utilizing departmental BI implementations arising in knowledge silos. This have resulted in disparate facts and figures and creates erroneous data and facts concurrency leading to misleading managerial decisions.

Operational data and its analysis within a pervasive BI implementation must provide uniformity and transparency at all levels, exposing the right information to the right user through BI tools enterprise-wide. This ensures concurrency and highly accurate data analysis leading to better decision making process based on 'singularly true facts'.

It must provide more insightful facts otherwise unknown to the organisation

A successful pervasive BI implementation should offer immediate ROI from increased and improved employee productivity levels. Pervasive BI increases the selling power of frontline operational staff by informing them with timely product offerings and opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling as they arise. This results from the product and services data drilling and monitoring role they play.

For analysts enterprise-wide, it should uncover future predictions based on past and present organizational performance. It provides them the power to report on enterprise data analysis showing the current state of business performance measurable against preset Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

For managers and strategists who are decision makers at various levels, it should provide insights through various reports, which uncover potential business investment opportunities that will make the enterprise more nimble and responsive to rapid changes occurring in its business environment. It may also provide investment opportunities which will move the enterprise into a new market.

It must provide adequate data security

Pervasive BI systems should be inherently secure in order not to expose the wrong data and information to the wrong user. This means that the BI system implemented should follow protocols and rules providing accurate data access and transmission standards to categorized classes of users. For example, a frontline employee should be provided with products and services information that currently show stock, availability, bundles and offers; and not be provided information exposing deep level Supply Chain Management information.

It should also obey high security standards following industry and government requirements on how its data is captured, stored, analyzed, disseminated and utilized. The BI system should these follow protocols in order to ensure that their business is accountable and prove legitimate and legal competitive advantage.