Why Operational Intelligence Is Often Neglected
Posted on: 28 June 2016
For your business to operate effectively, you need to understand a large volume of data, business processes and activities to understand where your business is currently at. By having access to so much data, it is easier for businesses to regularly adapt to changing consumer requirements. Operational intelligence is in contact with strategic and tactical intelligence. Each of these aspects of business should work together, with operational intelligence being the end result. However, operational intelligence is often neglected.
How Operational Intelligence Works
An example of operational intelligence would be a customer service representative who is pulling up a customer's information. The representative many not even realize that he or she is using operational intelligence. While it is an essential and common process, it is also one of the least developed processes in the arena of business intelligence. Instead, decisions are often made on an individual level, rather than being automated.
Human Error
The problem with not automating decisions is that they become more prone to human error and cannot be made as quickly. For instance, a customer service representative may not realize that a customer has a balance that is past due and may not then redirect a customer to billing, rather than treating the situation as if it is a technical issue. Employees, therefore, need access to enterprise software that can allow them to query information. Once accessed, the information can then be used to make rapid decisions.
Strategic Decision Making Through Operational Data
Operational business intelligence feeds back into strategic and tactical business intelligence operations. Business leaders can make decisions and can receive immediate feedback gathered by employees, most often customer service representatives, to determine whether these new strategies are effective. For this to be possible, data must be very current and representatives must be trained on the type of data that must be entered into the database. Data must be gathered without degrading the performance of the customer service representatives.
One of the questions ends up being whether data warehousing should be used with this process or if it should be bypassed. If data warehousing is used, the question is whether the same business standards will be implemented to make sure that the data is cleansed. When operational streams are pulled out of data warehousing, the data quality can be compromised. This may lead to divergent data that later does not reconcile. Given these challenges, it is important to work with a business intelligence consulting service to ensure that you are using your data in an efficient manner that helps improve operational strategies.
Share