Real-time business intelligence is the process of delivering information about business operations as they occur. In this context, real-time means a range from milliseconds to a few seconds after the business event has occurred. While traditional business intelligence presents historical data for manual analysis, real-time business intelligence compares current business events with historical patterns to detect problems or opportunities automatically. This automated analysis capability enables corrective actions to be initiated and or business rules to be adjusted to optimize business processes.

In today’s competitive environment with high consumer expectation, decisions that are based on the most current data available will improve customer relationships, increase revenue, and maximize operational efficiencies. The speed of today’s processing systems has moved classical data warehousing into the realm of real-time. The result is real-time business intelligence (RTBI). Business transactions are fed as they occur to a real-time business intelligence system that maintains the current state of the enterprise. The RTBI system not only supports the classical strategic functions of data warehousing for deriving information and knowledge from past enterprise activity, but it also provides real-time tactical support to drive enterprise actions that react to immediate events. As such, it replaces both the classical data warehouse and the enterprise application integration (EAI) functions.

Real-time business intelligence is also known as event-driven business intelligence. With real-time business intelligence, an enterprise establishes long-term strategies to optimize its operations while at the same time reacting with intelligence to events as they occur.

References:

Wikipedia

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