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Wednesday 9th November 2005
COMMENTARY - SOA FRAMEWORK FOR BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
| REFERENCES:
October 2005 - Service-Oriented Business Intelligence
In our June 2003 report on web services and business intelligence, we described the real-time enterprise in terms of a closed loop management control process, supported by web services and SOA. In this report we look further at how SOA affects Business Intelligence. We examine classes of BI services and techniques for managing the granularity and abstraction of data to support the issues of complex and unstructured information needs.
http://www.cbdiforum.com/secure/interact/2005-10/Service_Oriented_Bus_Intelligence.php
June 2003 - Web Services To Improve Business Intelligence
With many new concepts there is a tendency for everyone to jump on the bandwagon. Thus we often see vendors rebranding their products and refashioning their marketing messages - sometimes regardless of genuine fit, relevance and readiness. But in the area of BI, there is strong justification for vendors to be getting excited about Web Services. The core attributes of Web Services potentially enable some really exciting and revolutionary ways to get more, better business intelligence. In this report we set some expectations and identify some vendors that seem to understand this perspective.
http://www.cbdiforum.com/secure/interact/2003-06/bi.php3
Thursday 7th February 2002
COMMENTARY - WHERE DID THEY GO, I JUST DON'T KNOW . . .
Some of our readers may have noticed a little commercial difficulty suffered recently by Kodak in the UK. Many will have heard of the troubles of Allied Irish Bank and its missing millions. These are important case studies that help us better understand trust and security architectures.
| Earlier today someone asked me what horizon our research is focused upon. I replied highly variable, ranging from SOA based methodology that is entirely applicable today to business patterns and modelling techniques that will in our opinion only go into mainstream adoption when enterprises are in the (CBDI Roadmap) Reengineering Stage.
One of the more speculative aspects of our research applies to Business Intelligence. Back in June 2003 we described the real-time enterprise in terms of a closed loop management control process, supported by web services and SOA. We were nothing less than excited by the prospect of real time process feedback and control loops that gave business such a powerful tool to monitor status and set rules to respond instantly.
Back then we used the Kodak case study – remember the pricing error that caused a flood of sales at ridiculous prices, which could easily have been avoided by sensible rules?
Last month we returned to this subject, and took a fresh look. We still remain firmly of the opinion that real time control is one of the most interesting aspects to SOA, and of course some enterprises are just starting to dip their toes into this particular pool as they use mediation services together with rules engines to monitor key metrics and measures. However this time around we took a much broader viewpoint. We asked the question how can we use SOA more broadly in this domain? How do we identify reusable BI services which can allow us to more easily answer difficult and or complex questions that we have only just thought of? For example:
What are the factors that cause fluctuation in the market demand for this item?
What are the technical drivers for customer purchasing decisions?
What are the root causes of this observed variation in this manufacturing process?
What are the effective differences between version i and version j of this manufacturing process?
How sensitive is this analysis to the frequency with which we record the measurements?
Clearly traditional analysis techniques are not going to help us here.
What’s required is a second order model to find derived business objects – such as VARIATION, CORRELATION, that themselves represent atomic units of capability that allow us to assemble answers to complex inquiries from a set of parts that together can answer the complex questions.
And here the SOA environment provides a ready made infrastructure to support the dynamic reuse of piece parts. This leads directly to new classification systems for BI services, that allow us to set policies that are comparable with operational service policies. In the same way we have core business; underlying and utility services, all with quite distinct behaviours and policies for such matters as capability and dependency, in the BI world we identify factory services, information services and business management services.
I suspect we haven’t finished here. But the concept of an SOA architecture for BI provides us with a foundation to bring perhaps just the right amount of structure (too much would be disastrous) to an increasingly important application area. |
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