Operational Business Intelligence: Spot Problems Sooner

CIO — It's a frustration every CIO has experienced: Business users complain that they're not getting the performance or results they expect from their enterprise applications, yet IT's investigations continue to show that systems are working within specifications. At Freescale Semiconductor, CIO Sam Coursen faced this issue when he joined the chip manufacturer a year ago: During the expensive fabrication process, some wafers containing microcircuits had defects that couldn't be traced. Those defects became visible only after the wafers had passed through several systems or factories. "Until we could bring all the systems together for analysis, we couldn't see the pattern end to end," he recalls, "So as a bad process went on, it damaged more and more product. But the causes were not obvious, so we couldn't fix it quickly."

Student loan provider SLM Corp. (better known as Sallie Mae) faced a similar problem, recalls Jo Lee Hayes, VP of enterprise technology. Some loan applications didn't get completed, but IT couldn't see what was causing applicants to give up. Each system along the way checked out fine, but only when her IT staff could analyze the end-to-end process did it realize the aggregate state was flawed. Essentially, the underlying business processes weren't meshing well or delivering as expected. A portion of customers would abandon loans being processed and some percentage of those customers would call for support, increasing the cost of loans. The current fix: "With TealeafTechnology and Coral8 [analytics software], we can identify specifically which Web page the customer was on prior to calling," Hayes says. Her team gives that data to support agents and analyzes spots where the Web drop-offs occur frequently.

One way CIOs can gain operational analytics capability is to use a single application suite that can monitor the relevant data in the right context as it flows through the system. But that's not realistic for enterprises. "Processes don't fit into single systems anymore," Hayes notes. And although Coursen is consolidating many applications into an ERP system, he still expects to have at least a half dozen other key systems, such as manufacturing execution , product data management and customer relationship management systems,, across which processes will run. "SAP's BI tools are only good for what's in SAP," he notes, so such application-specific analytics won't help.

Both IT leaders say they had a revelation: While operational BI requires a common platform on which to do its analysis, that platform need not be an application suite like ERP or CRM. For Coursen, that common platform is his data warehouse; for Hayes, it's her Web-based transaction environment.

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