Operational intelligence (OI) platforms are software systems that allow companies to monitor, analyze, and optimize business operations and processes in real time.
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Key features of an OI platform
What are the benefits of OI platforms?
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What Is Operational Intelligence?
Operational intelligence (OI) refers to techniques for analyzing real-time data to enhance visibility, optimize workflows, and improve overall business efficiency.
OI relies on the latest automation technologies, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to enable dynamic, real-time business analysis. This allows OI to quickly deliver relevant, actionable information to workers and business managers.
OI solutions typically integrate with existing IT infrastructure, running queries against a stream of real-time data and delivering analytic insights.
Most often, the results of OI data processing provide operational instructions aimed at immediate use by frontline workers and managers.
Modern OI solutions are considered a step above the business intelligence tools that predated them.
According to research by MMR, the OI market is expected to grow at a rate of 12.08% from 2023–2029, reaching almost $5.16 bn by 2029.
What Are OI Platforms?
OI platforms enable real-time monitoring, analysis, and optimization of business operations and processes. They connect to live data from sources like sensors, databases, and applications across an organization.
These platforms apply statistical modeling, data visualization, AI, and other analytical techniques to surface meaningful patterns, correlations, trends, and anomalies from data streams. The goal is to identify risks, inefficiencies, and opportunities as they emerge.
OI platforms provide actionable insights via dashboards, alerts, and recommendations that empower managers and workers to make swift, data-driven decisions.
Types of Operational Intelligence Platforms
Operational intelligence platforms can be categorized based on the type of systems and data they monitor.
Some of the most common OI platform types include:
- IT infrastructure monitoring platforms
- Business process monitoring platforms
- Log analysis platforms
- Production monitoring platforms
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Platforms
IT infrastructure monitoring platforms analyze data from servers, networks, databases, and other IT systems. They track live performance metrics like CPU usage, latency, uptime, and bandwidth utilization.
When issues emerge, the platform generates alerts to help IT teams quickly isolate problems and restore normal operations.
Business Process Monitoring Platforms
These platforms connect to the different systems involved in business processes, such as enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, and customer relationship management systems.
They analyze the end-to-end workflow, identifying bottlenecks, deviations, and inefficiencies.
Log Analysis Platforms
Log analysis platforms aggregate and analyze machine-generated log data from servers, devices, and applications. This could include web server logs, security event logs, application error logs, and more.
Log analysis enables deeper visibility into usage patterns, performance issues, and security threats. These platforms use techniques like aggregates, filters, and statistical analysis to turn log data into meaningful insights.
Production Monitoring Platforms
In industrial environments, production monitoring platforms connect to sensors and control systems on the factory floor and production lines. They provide real-time visibility into all stages of manufacturing operations.
Production teams can quickly detect equipment failures, quality issues, bottlenecks, and other problems that impact output and efficiency.
The Best OI Platforms
The operational intelligence market is full of powerful tools you can choose to enrich your business. Here are our top choices:
- Splunk is a leading platform for gathering and analyzing real-time machine data from across IT systems and devices. Splunk provides powerful data ingestion, correlation, and visualization features.
- Elastic provides log aggregation, infrastructure metrics monitoring, application performance monitoring, and analytical insights. It is known for the ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) stack.
- Datadog is a cloud-based monitoring and analytics tool for infrastructure, applications, logs, and business KPIs. It integrates with hundreds of technologies.
- Azure Monitor is a Microsoft offering that combines infrastructure monitoring, log analytics, application insights, and a network watcher for cloud and on-premises resources.
- Grafana is an open-source platform focused on metrics monitoring and visualization for web dashboards.
- PagerDuty specializes in event intelligence, incident response, and automation. It is great for real-time alerting and remediation.
- AppDynamics is an end-to-end application performance monitoring with deep, code-level insights using APM agents.
- Moogsoft uses AIOPS for automated anomaly detection, event correlation, alert management, and remediation recommendations.
- Sumo Logic is a cloud-native log analysis and monitoring solution with analytics, security use cases, and numerous integrations.
What Are the Key Features of OI Platforms?
Key features of OI platforms include:
- Real-time monitoring
- Dashboards and visualizations
- Real-time alerting systems
- Industry-specific analysis
- On-demand report generation
- Big data and machine learning capabilities
- Automatic remediation operations
- Infinite scalability
Real-Time Monitoring
OI solutions monitor data sources in real time, whether from factory sensors, retail sales, or application crash alerts. The defining capability is real-time analysis and alerting, often within seconds of an event occurring.
Continuous monitoring allows for the detection of issues or anomalies while they are happening, enabling an immediate response. It also allows organizations to track live operational metrics, and KPIs to support the making of informed decisions.
Dashboards and Visualizations
OI platforms provide customizable dashboards that visualize analyzed data through spiral charts, bar charts, graphs, gauges, maps, and other graphics. These visualization tools present live operational metrics, KPIs, and insights.
Real-time dashboards enable easy detection of patterns, trends, and anomalies. Intuitive visual interfaces make OI insights accessible to a wider range of users across the organization.
Some key aspects of dashboards and visualizations in OI platforms include:
- Real-time visualization of analyzed operational data
- Ability to customize views for different users and uses
- Visual format enhances the detection of trends
- Makes operational data analysis intuitive and accessible
Real-Time Alerting Systems
OI platforms also alert users when important events occur. Users can choose specific conditions and thresholds for which they want to get notifications. Alerts are populated on the dashboard or sent to the user via mobile device notification or email.
Industry-Specific Analysis
OI platforms can be applied across many industries, including manufacturing, retail, and financial services. However, each industry has unique operational needs and challenges.
To address this, OI platforms allow dashboards to be customized based on the industry and use case. Key analytics can be tailored and prioritized in the dashboards to focus on the most relevant operational insights for users in that domain.
On-Demand Report Generation
On-demand report generation builds a broader picture and enables sharing with others. Users can create custom reports drawing from historical operational data to identify trends, compare time periods, uncover anomalies, and more.
Unlike static reporting in traditional business intelligence tools, report generation in OI platforms leverages up-to-date data for accurate insights. Drag-and-drop interfaces allow intuitive report building without coding. Report scheduling features automatically run reports and distribute them to stakeholders on a recurring basis.
On-demand reporting expands the value derived from OI platforms. These reports supplement monitoring with big-picture analytics while, at the same time, they enable collaboration and alignment across the whole organization.
Big Data and Machine Learning Capabilities
OI platforms leverage big-data infrastructure and machine learning algorithms to unlock valuable insights from massive amounts of operational data. Platforms ingest and index hundreds of terabytes of streaming data daily. Advanced machine learning models then analyze this data to discover trends, anomalies, and patterns difficult to detect through traditional approaches alone.
As a result, organizations gain a deeper understanding of performance drivers, make more accurate forecasts, and identify new opportunities.
Automatic Remediation Operations
When OI platforms detect a problem, they can either alert you or take action to repair the problem itself. Some platforms allow the defining of automated responses and workflows triggered by alert conditions. The platform can initiate preconfigured remediation procedures according to the detected problem.
Automated remediation reduces the downtime and human effort required to rectify issues. It enables near real-time responses to operational events and failures.
Infinite Scalability
As organizations collect more and more data, OI platforms need to seamlessly scale up to handle it. The best platforms use cloud computing to add resources when needed. They can instantly get extra computing power and storage by spinning up cloud servers programmatically.
Leading platforms can scale out horizontally across many servers to divide up growing data volumes. They use smart technical architectures and systems such as Kafka and Cassandra to quickly process incoming data. The platforms automatically scale up and down to meet changing demands.
What Are the Benefits of OI Platforms?
For most enterprise-level companies, OI platforms are a good investment. Some of the benefits of OI platforms include:
- Increased uptime and system reliability. OI platforms help detect and address issues proactively before they cause outages.
- Faster incident response. Alerting and automation capabilities of OI platforms enable faster reaction to incidents to minimize impact.
- Improved efficiency and cost savings. By optimizing processes and resource usage based on operational data, OI drives greater efficiency and reduces costs.
- Better compliance and security. OI provides audit traceability and detects threats early through analytics.
- Data-driven decision making. Analytics and visualization options empower data-driven real-time decision making.
- Competitive advantages from leveraging data. Deeper operational insights enable innovation, improved customer experiences, and strategic differentiation.
Operational intelligence software provides invaluable visibility into an organization’s core operations, from monitoring business activities to analyzing metadata and root causes, allowing for faster, data-driven decision making.
Here at Symplicity, we focus on getting you the best technology solutions from the best providers, at the best prices. Schedule a free consultation today to learn how we can help.
Operational Intelligence vs. Business Intelligence
While business intelligence looks backward—analyzing historical data to uncover long-term trends and patterns—operational intelligence is solely focused on what’s happening right now.
Here are some of the key distinctions between the two:
- Data focus. OI focuses on real-time operational data. BI looks at historical business data from sources like CRM, ERP, and financial systems.
- Analysis objective. OI aims to detect issues and optimize processes and resources in real-time. BI identifies trends and insights for longer-term strategy.
- Timeframe. OI is real-time, analyzing streaming data as it arrives. BI works with historical data to identify patterns over time.
- Use cases. OI is used by system admins, operations teams, and production managers to maintain systems. BI enables executives, marketing, sales, and finance teams to make business decisions.
- Analytics depth. OI applies advanced machine learning to operational data. BI relies more on visualization, statistics, and SQL queries on structured data.
- Actionability. OI outputs prescriptive actions for immediate decisions. BI provides descriptive insights for exploration and planning.
- Architecture. OI uses technologies like Kafka, Spark, and Cassandra optimized for speed. BI leverages data warehouses and online analytical processing.
- Accessibility. OI insight consumers are mainly operations practitioners and analysts. BI expands access to a broader employee base.
Business intelligence platforms, along with OI platforms, enable organizations to not just optimize current operations, but also plan for the future.
Need Help With Technology?
Whether you’re struggling to evaluate the best iPaaS solution or trying to implement a business intelligence platform, Symplicity can help. Here are some of the ways:
- Technology expense management (TEM): we’ll make sure you’re getting the right solutions at the best value.
- Map the journey and pain points of your customers.
- Implement disaster recovery and business continuity solutions.
- Cybersecurity and managed IT: identify vulnerabilities and opportunities, and find the best providers for you.
- Telephony and communications management: SIP trunking, mobile device management, upgrading legacy systems.
- Contact center solutions, including contact center as a service (CCaaS).
- Business integration solutions, including unified communication as a service (UCaaS).
At Symplicity, we take a vendor-neutral approach, carefully analyzing your business requirements, budget, and industry to identify the ideal solution for your needs.
We understand that every organization has unique priorities and challenges, which is why we offer a customized approach to match you with the perfect solution. We connect you with the best providers based on their expertise, track record, and ability to meet your specific requirements.
See our solutions page for the full range of services we offer.
Operational Intelligence Platforms FAQ
What is operational intelligence in the military?
Operational intelligence in the military refers to the real-time information and analysis that commanders need to make decisions during tactical operations and missions. It involves advanced analytics and assessments focused specifically on the user experience for military personnel in the field to maximize mission effectiveness.
OI provides updated data on enemy movements, terrain, weather, and other battleground conditions. It requires seamlessly integrating intelligence from multiple sources like drones, satellites, and field observations to enable commanders to respond and adapt quickly for optimal mission outcomes.
What is operational intelligence in psychology?
In psychology, the term operational intelligence relates to cognitive processes that allow us to perceive relationships, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, and learn quickly. It represents applied aspects of intelligence rooted in our ability to grasp concepts combined with executive functioning for planning, reasoning, and problem-solving.
Researchers have developed tests of operational intelligence that measure these capabilities that are crucial for real-world user experiences and tasks.
What is an example of operational intelligence?
One example of operational intelligence is a manufacturing company using sensors and analytics software to monitor all of its assembly lines at an exact moment. The OI platform ingests streaming data on equipment performance, throughput, defect rates, downtime incidents, and other metrics. It applies advanced analytics like machine learning algorithms to detect potential issues and identify optimization opportunities.
When anomalies occur, it triggers alerts to engineers and provides insights to dynamically adjust processes for maximum quality, yield, and customer satisfaction.
What is operational intelligence in ServiceNow?
ServiceNow offers operational intelligence capabilities through its Integration Hub and Performance Analytics modules.
- Integration Hub ingests real-time data streams from diverse sources across the enterprise.
- Performance Analytics then applies machine learning and visualization to uncover operational intelligence.
Users can create custom dashboards and analytics to monitor processes, pinpoint inefficiencies, analyze workload trends, optimize staffing, and enhance user experiences.
Who uses operational intelligence?
Operational intelligence provides the greatest value to roles that need real-time insights on business operations, including:
- IT staff
- Security professionals
- Product engineers
- Supply chain analysts
- Customer service
- Business leaders
What are the 4 phases of the intelligence cycle?
The four phases of the intelligence cycle are:
- Planning and direction—identify intelligence needs and determine collection priorities
- Collection—gather raw data and information from all relevant sources
- Analysis—process the collected information to distill key insights
- Dissemination—deliver timely, useful intelligence to the appropriate consumers
This cyclic process converts disconnected data points into actionable operational intelligence.
References
Operational Intelligence Market: Global Industry Analysis and Forecast (2023-2029). (n.d.). maximize market research. Retrieved November 16, 2023, from https://www.maximizemarketresearch.com/market-report/global-operational-intelligence-market/64151/
