The business intelligence solutions provided in most applications are passive. Users must come to the software’s reporting service to request a dashboard, a report, or a pivot table. Reporting required for making informed decisions, although it is available, must be demanded. At every level of the enterprise, the staff stays informed by religiously enjoining their software to answer questions. Executives, managers, and operational staff incessantly ask for information and plain-language interpretations of key performance indicators. The business intelligence systems respond by faithfully producing dashboards, reports, and pivot tables.
Business intelligence is supposed to help accelerate and improved decision making and increased operational efficiency but are you one of the people constantly poking your web application for an update? Do you find yourself frequently returning to a computer so that you can run another report? Are you constantly refreshing an app to ask the system about inventory, sales, security, disease outbreaks, invoice status, defect count, support ticket trends, or any other key performance indicator of interest?
Rather than leading, you are constantly reading reports to discover what is needed to make a good decision. Work-life balance is nonexistent, and rather than living, your time is vitiated by a burning desire to be informed. You cannot risk finding out too late that things went awry or that an opportunity arose and went unnoticed. So you do what any dedicated employee does – run reports all the time. Otherwise, you are left with an overwhelming sense of guilt.
The problems related to this mode of artificial intelligence are easy to see. The passivity of the BI solution makes users wrap their activities around gathering information. Users must come to the reporting service to get a decision support intel since it will not bring the information to them. The absence of timely notifications about opportunities and obstacles make the goals and mission of the organization subject to greater risk. BrainJack™ ActiveBI fixes these problems by making business intelligence proactive. Three aspects of ActiveBI come together to free you up to focus on the business goals and not business intelligence.
Business Rules
Not every report you run has the information you need. ActiveBI can look at your business rules to determine if the report should be sent. Using business rules you can determine whether a report is sent and who gets it. Business rules can be very complex. An experienced professional might take hours to determine if the data in a spreadsheet is important. BrainJack™ ActiveBI can do it in seconds… or less.
Flexible Delivery
BrainJack™ ActiveBI brings the report to you. It can be delivered as an attachment to an e-mail or as a text. Or both. That is, you can get a text telling you that your key performance indicator has a value that requires your attention. Check your e-mail and get the full report.
Scheduling
BrainJack™ ActiveBI checks on your metric of interest faster than any person can or will. In the wee hours of the morning or many times per hour or during the holidays, it is checking your key performance indicator to see if a threshold has been exceeded. ActiveBI lets you create a KPI checking schedule of arbitrary complexity.
Your metrics of interest are checked with superhuman frequency. The complex or simple decisions about whether to send a notification and who to send it to is calculated in milliseconds based on your business rules. Finally, only the information of interest is brought to you for your review.
With ActiveBI, you can stop focusing on your business intelligence. In fact, leveraging things like Active BI, don’t focus on business intelligence! Business intelligence should not have all of your attention. The business should. There are aspects of the business that cannot be discovered in a dashboard, reviewed in a report, or perused in a pivot table. As cool as the dashboards are they are not the point of your position in your company. They are there to help you quickly turn information into insights for the making of timely, risk-mitigating, success promoting decisions. Business intelligence, in all its many forms, is a tool for accomplishing goals. It is a means and not an end
