Operational Analytics: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

by Colin White, Business Intelligence Network

Operational analytics is an important and growing field of business intelligence (BI). As is typical with any evolving technology, new and sometimes confusing buzzwords are suddenly introduced in technical articles and vendor marketing campaigns. Some of these buzzwords add valuable new ideas, while others are simply a repackaging of old ones. In this article, I explore operational analytics buzzwords, such as complex event processing (CEP) and stream analytics, and review their relationship to the familiar world of business intelligence.

The motivation for the article came from an excellent presentation by Hamid Pirahesh of IBM Research at a recent IBM conference in Las Vegas. The presentation, “Forces Defining the Next Generation of Business Intelligence and Analytics,” discussed many of the different concepts of operational analytics outlined in this article, and my article borrows several of Hamid’s examples to demonstrate the potential business value for this aspect of business intelligence. Read the article.