Merging Enterprise And Web 2.0

by Dan Woods, Forbes.com

Operational intelligence, as envisioned by TIBCO and Vitira co-founder Dale Skeen, builds on the power of “well-loved” systems known by such acronyms as BI, BPM, BAM and CEP.  Skeen says traditional forms of business analysis are too backward looking, too narrow in scope and insufficiently collaborative. Operational intelligence merges the structured world of enterprise applications with the collaborative world of Web 2.0.

Operational intelligence posits that although the information and capabilities of the well-loved systems are important and valuable, they don’t go far enough. The scope of information included must expand beyond what is stored in enterprise applications. For example, weather, traffic, stock and commodity prices, logistics flows and free-text search retrievals must supplement the transactional data from enterprise applications. Multiple processes are monitored. Once something interesting is noticed, the system must support unstructured collaboration to resolve problems and take action. Link