Reaping business intelligence's harvest

David Braue ZDNet Australia

Published: 05 Jan 2004 11:59 GMT

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"Correlating information about problems with the topology of our services helps us prioritise things, but that has to be done in near real time," says William Lee, head of network operations with the company. "This real-time information has to be presented to an operator, technician, or manager for them to be able to take either proactive or very fast reactive action to fix the problem. You get the base level of information from the system, but you still need smart people to react. At the end of the day, you still rely on good people and technicians."

Application of business intelligence analytics to TelstraClear's issues handling reveals patterns in performance and lets managers highlight areas for potential future investments. This information is then fed back into the company's analytical processes, driving decisions about funding and budgeting as well as future hiring, training of technical experts and other decisions. In this way, TelstraClear's BIN produces meaningful information about the company's operations and ties in the expertise of people into a continuous feedback loop aimed at continuous service improvement.

BIN doesn't operate in isolation, however: as if one three-letter acronym wasn't enough, many in the industry also point out the importance of business activity monitoring (BAM), which is a composite of BI, network systems management, and application integration and middleware.

If BIN provides the sheer data analytics and human decision-making to channel information processing, BAM embodies the business layer of the decision-making process. Gartner recognises 10 key activities that fall under the scope of BAM:

spelling out business processes;

achieving consensus on data and process standards;

identifying key parameters and establishing historical trend data;

a community-based approach to user interface design;

a high-payback, incremental approach;

change management and technology adoption;

ongoing measurement of business results;

integration of the process model within a BI framework;

optimising the BAM solution;

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data and application integration.

Only three of these areas are directly driven by BI technology; the rest are business decisions, or reflect the application of BI to business activities. Gartner describes BAM's role as "to reduce or eliminate delays, bottlenecks and inefficient use of labour and materials, while providing real-time financial and performance data. BAM will be an analytical tool that enterprises must wield to gain a near 'zero latency' position -- that is, to reduce the time between capturing new data in one area and making it available and usable somewhere else."

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