Is RTBI worth it?

After all the praises that are showered upon RTBI, it is still essential to assess whether this strategic solution is worth the challenges that come with its implementation. What are the main issues that lie en-route a successful RTBI implementation? Trawling in just a few RTBI publications, an avalanche of challenges are revealed by different authors. Although some are revealed with workaround solutions, most are just declared as solid impediments that would continuously resist RTBI services within an organization. The following are a few of the identified burning issues.

Gravic, Inc. (2010) mentions one major problem as inherent in the structural configuration of most business enterprises. A business enterprise normally adopts one or several applications for its business operations. These applications are developed, honed and modified over years. However, the adoption of RTBI might impose a reconfiguration need on all or some of these tried and tested applications within a firm (Karapala, 2010c; 2010b). Gravic, Inc. (2010) associates this need to high costs and possible immeasurable risks. That is, since RTBI is an endeavour to integrate data generated from all organizational business activities, information technology (IT) applications might have to be overhauled to conform to integration rules. Thus depending on the uniformity, and application development standards adhered to when these applications were developed, the firm might incur innumerable losses from breaking core business processes (posing as a lifeblood to business,) when it undertakes an initiative to redefine these IT applications.

Raden (2008) points out that RTBI introduces a new form of competition among firms. He mentions analytics as the emerging form of competition in the market place, due to increasing RTBI adoption. Therefore, a company adopting RTBI is indirectly committing into continuous enhancement of the RTBI analytical capability such that the RTBI function resist obsolescence. As the organization evolves, RTBI should subsequently do the same to meet the new needs posed by business evolution. Raden (2008) refers to the RTBI advancement in tandem to new business needs as instrument flexibility. This simply means that RTBI as a technology should be elastic enough to vary with business needs. In addition it could mean regular procurement of hardware to avoid RTBI processing speed from deteriorating to unaccepted levels, or intense human resource management to prevent possible losses of sought after RTBI skills.

Most prominent and purportedly robust vendor databases are incapable to multitask and still be able to provide efficiency (Gathibandhe, Deogirikar and Gupta, 2010). RTBI relies on live data updates, meaning there should be constant interrogation to the same database capturing new, and modifying existing transactions. Gathibandhe et al. (2010) and Gravic, Inc. (2010) postulate that there are very few databases that are capable of doing this, and those that do, charge exorbitant amounts in license fees. The onus therefore rests upon the organization intending adoption to either carve extraordinary means to bypass this hindrance, or invest in expensive database solutions.

Most of pre-packaged BI solutions are only good to offer delusional claims of excellence (Syncsort, 2010), without any physical delivery of value. Turn-key BI solutions are mainly defined to answer the designer envisaged problem (Gravic, Inc., 2010), and this might not be the same as the problems of individual business firms posing as consumers of such solutions. Thus there is no short cut, the RTBI implementation means custom development, and one which might only prove invaluable long after delivery.

Vesset (2009) and Martin (2009) view RTBI (or BI to be precise) as the most accurate measuring scale any organization could use to measure the actual perfromance, and prognostication of its future complexion. This translates to the fact that any organization devoid of it, is simply attempting to run and manage resources which it cannot measure. However, this golden scale comes at a cost, but at the same time a question can be posed: is the cost worth the benefits to be gained? Again, if indeed the statement laid by The economist (2009) is true that information is the currency and knowledge is the coin of this digital age, then where is the mint? The decision lies upon all people who have find this topic interesting to follow from start to this end.

References:

1. Gathibandhe, H., Deogirikar, S. and Gupta, A.K (2010). How smart is real-time BI? http://www.information-management.com/infodirect/2009_152/real_time_business_intelligence-10017057-1.html?pg=1 (Accessed 17-July-2010).
2. Gravic, Inc. (2010). The evolution of real-time business intelligence. Available from: http://www.gravic.com/shadowbase/whitepapers.html (Accessed 24 May 2010).
3. Karapala, K. (2010b). Business intelligence strategies: Keys to success. http://www.information-management.com/infodirect/2009_164/BI_strategy-10017847-1.html?ET=informationmgmt:e1524:2230379a:&st=email&utm_source=editorial&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=IM_IMD_051310 (Accessed 19-July-2010).
4. Karapala, K. (2010c). The role of strategy in BI. http://www.information-management.com/infodirect/2009_167/business_intelligence_bi_strategy-10018001-1.html?ET=informationmgmt:e1561:2230379a:&st=email&utm_source=editorial&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=IM_IMD_060310 (Accessed 19-July-2010).
5. Raden, N. (2008). Fast Analytics and business intelligence for everyone: best practices for deploying collaborative bi. http://www.information-management.com/web_seminars/10000819-1.html (Accessed 14 June 2010).
6. Martin, W. (2009). Agile corporate management. http://www.wolfgang-martin-team.net/research-notes.php (Accessed 15 June 2010).
7. Syncsort (2010). Business drivers and enabling technologies for clickstream data warehouse initiatives. http://www.syncsort.com/6de3ffc5-5f7b-435f-880d-f3c02167cf1f/clk2axd-Business-Technologies-Clickstream.htm (Accessed 10 July 2010).
8. The economist (2009). Organisational agility: How business can survive and thrive in turbulent times. http://www.emc.com/collateral/leadership/organisational-agility-230309.pdf (Accessed 10 August 2010).
9. Vesset, D. (2009). Gaining competitive differentiation from business intelligence and analytics solution. http://www.information-management.com/white_papers/-10017911-1.html (Accessed 16 JUL 2010).