Rittman: Colin White : "Now is the Right Time for Real-Time BI"

Mark Rittman points out a DMReview article, Colin White : "Now is the Right Time for Real-Time BI".

I have a little first hand experience creating custom BAM solutions, and when they work right, the results are transformative in nature. After all, much of a line manager's job involves reacting to problems, or in figuring out what the overall picture based on very subjective input they get from from employees or customers. BAM can take all the guess work out of an assessment of the state of a process, and it can even be designed to automatically take action.

Take a large-company IT Help Desk for example. A BAM solution can keep track of ticket levels, and do it by application, and compare it to a daily average for that application. If a certain app is producing more tickets than normal all of a sudden, this might be missed completely within the Help Desk application, which is designed to improve the productivity of Call Reps (which most do quite well), but not spot such high level things. With BAM, the problem could be identified immediately, alert the Help Desk Manager with an email or page, and even fire off an alert to group that manages that particular application (and maybe notify customers proactively, before they start hitting the phones to complain). The best solutions allow this to be done without any changes to the underlying application or workflow, so like many good BI projects, it essentially leverages the existing data stored in the application to generate processed, actionalbe intelligence.

That's what I've seen a BAM solution do... a good one can change a stale, reactive enterprise application that handles workflow well into a living, breathing, active application that manages the process itself, plus everyone that works in it, at least much more so than before. It frees up managers to concentrate on more important things than trying to figure out by looking around the room if there is a problem right now.

Or maybe, can eliminate them? It's possible. It definitely wil change their focus.