written by
5000fish Team

What is Operational Intelligence?

BI Terminology 4 min read
DashboardFox - Operational Intelligence Dashboards

Operational intelligence is sweeping businesses across the globe. But why exactly is it becoming so popular?

There is a lot of tech jargon surrounding this type of business tech, which may put off some potential users.

Don’t worry-- If you’re interested in learning how operational intelligence can drastically change your business operations, we’re here to break it all down so that the non-developer can grasp it.

Let’s dive into what operational intelligence is, its benefits, its difficulties, and where you can get awesome OI tech.

What is Operational Intelligence?

Operational intelligence, also known as OI, is a type of real-time business analytics that allows users to see into business operations. OI solutions utilize query analysis against live feeds and data to create visibility and insight into business or information technology operations.

This information can be used in a number of ways. OI can allow for alerts to be sent, business processes can be prompted, and business decisions can be made and executed via a live dashboard.

Businesses often choose to use operational intelligence because of the benefit of real-time monitoring. This allows business executives to make on-the-spot decisions that could affect the livelihood of their company as quickly as possible.

While we believe operational intelligence is a fantastic and innovative technology to implement into any business, it does have its pros and cons. Let’s look at them both.

The Benefits of Operational Intelligence

There are many reasons to invest in OI.

It’s easy to implement. OI solutions are much easier to integrate into established processes and are also easier to navigate with user-friendly mechanization.

Performance will be improved and risk will be reduced. Probably the biggest benefit to OI is how it allows for real-time visibility into business operations. This allows for quick decision-making when faced with various business troubles.

It can cut costs. The need for obsolete and often ineffective business intelligence tools is long gone once you invest in OI. Business users will no longer have to waste budget money on expensive event processing systems. There are a ton of open source technologies out there that can process massive volumes of data at lightning speed for free or quite cheap.

You’ll have a competitive edge. By having such quick access and alerts to issues or discrepancies within your business data, you’ll be able to stay on top of operations in ways that other businesses can’t.

While OI is incredible, it does have its cons as well.

The Difficulties of Operational Intelligence

It’s worth noting that different OI products can produce different difficulties and that OI as a whole concept does not have each one of these difficulties.

It doesn’t provide a strategy. You may have all the information laid out for you with OI, but it does not have the advanced technology to aid in decision-making or suggestions.

Data integrity is not always set in stone. Technology is more advanced than ever before, but there is still a chance that there will be discrepancies within your OI software.

There is a learning curve. While using OI solutions is incredibly easy, for the complete novice, there will be a bit of a learning curve in order to understand the data being presented.

How DashboardFox Can Provide Businesses with Excellent Operational Intelligence

We’ve covered everything about the pros and cons of operational intelligence. Now what?

If you’re interested in utilizing operational intelligence for your business, DashboardFox can deliver exactly what you need.

DashboardFox can connect directly to databases and pull back live data each time you run a report or dashboard. With DashboardFox, you will also have the ability to do live queries against multiple data sources, combine the data from multiple databases real-time to calculate formulas, and perform data joins to show data that provides more value and context.

DashboardFox also has a layer of security to ensure that all real-time data is properly limited or constrained so that you only have access to what you need to know. This applies to users viewing the report, building reports, or even the DashboardFox administrators.

DashboardFox has an API that can be used by other third-party tools to retrieve a real-time secure data feed. Essentially, DashboardFox can act as a data broker and query multiple data sources in real-time. Another product can query the DashboardFox API to get a secure report in either XML or JSON format.

DashboardFox can convert the raw data into useable information in the form of a dashboard, KPIs, metrics, charts, and data visualizations. Users will be able to drill down to more discrete, transactional level data for analysis.

If you're looking for real-time business intelligence that is easy, powerful, and affordable, we want to help. Contact us and let's discuss your requirements and start a trial of DashboardFox in your environment.

How was our guide to operational intelligence? Do you think real-time business intelligence is important for analyzing data? Tell us what you think in the comments below!
Operational Intelligence