Real-Time Intelligence
So what is real-time intelligence? One useful definition is:
"Insights that provide timely, relevant information with meaningful metrics for real-time decisions"
To live up to this goal, real-time intelligence requires:
Real-Time and Comprehensive Data including:
Access to live data sources with no lags from intermediate copies or storage requirements.
Quick and easy access to a wide scope of information sources to ensure information is both relevant and well focused.
It must be simple to work with information from virtually any source, internal or external, historical, transactional or real-time, regardless of the technical requirements to access the information. And it must support secure access to information sources.
Flexible support for new information sources to keep pace with the changing 'information landscape'.
New information sources are created or discovered at an ever-increasing pace, just as new information requirements are.
Meaningful, Actionable Insights with:
A flexible, but powerful mechanism to combine, transform or analyze information to easily produce metrics and insights.
Direct leverage of business domain expertise to create metrics and insights and deliver them in rich, visual forms.
Using domain expertise directly enhances both relevance and timeliness. Information designed 'at the source of the problem' also tends to avoid translation errors common when design or delivery involves cross-domain expertise.
Easily defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that focus on your operational needs.
Meaningful KPIs help drive quick, incisive actions to real-time operations.
Both common and business-specific visualizations to make insights easily understood and compelling.
Visual forms must include common representations such as tables, maps and charts. This should also be flexible allowing business-specific or other more unique visualizations to be used as needed.
Portable Results:
To provide immediate and simple access to the resulting information, anywhere users need it.
Information needs to be delivered 'everywhere' users go and must be easily, but appropriately shared. Increasingly this means access on mobile devices as well as more traditional desktop environments.
It also means that information must be accessible in a variety of destinations, such as web sites, portals, collaboration systems such as Microsoft SharePoint, wikis or in an internal app store.
End-to-End Security with:
Secure access that follows IT policies at every step.
Governance must be applied to both new and old forms of information. User access to enterprise information simply cannot be a free-for-all. As users or developers create new information sources, access controls must also evolve seamlessly.
No data saved to devices.
Real-time access ensures no data is persisted on devices potentially allowing unsecured access.
Flexible security with support for both common and unique security protocols as needed. Information sources and delivery destinations alike may have different security requirements.
