Analyst Perspectives

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) extends digital connectivity to devices and sensors in homes, businesses, vehicles and potentially almost anywhere. This innovation enables devices designed for it to generate and transmit data about their operations; analytics using this data can facilitate monitoring and a range of automatic functions.

To perform these functions IoT requires what Ventana Research calls Operational Intelligence (OI), a discipline that has evolved from the capture and analysis of instrumentation, networking and machine-to-machine interactions of many types. We define operational intelligence as a set of event-centered information and analytic processes operating across an organization that enable people to use that event information to take effective actions and make optimal decisions. Our benchmark research into Operational Intelligence shows that organizations most often want to use such event-centric architectures for defining metrics (37%) and assigning thresholds for alerts (35%) and for more action-oriented processes of sending notifications to users (33%) and linking events to activities (27%).

In many industries, organizations can gain competitive advantage if they can reduce the elapsed time between an event occurring and actions taken or decisions made in response to it. Existing business intelligence (BI) tools provide useful analysis of and reporting on data drawn from previously recorded transactions, but to improve competitiveness and maximize efficiencies organizations are concluding that employees and processes – in IT, business operations and front-line customer sales, service and support – also need to be able to detect and respond to events as they happen. Our research into big data integration shows that nearly one in four companies currently integrate data into big data stores in real time. The challenge is to go further and act upon both the data that is stored and the data that is streaming in a timely manner.

The evolution of operational intelligence, especially in conjunction with IoT, is encouraging companies to revisit their priorities and spending for information technology and application management. However, sorting out the range of options poses a challenge for both business and IT leaders. Some see potential value in expanding their network infrastructure to support OI. Others are implementing event processing (EP) systems that employ new technology to detect meaningful patterns, anomalies and relationships among events. Increasingly, organizations are using dashboards, visualization and modeling to notify nontechnical people of events and enable them to understand their significance and take appropriate and immediate action.

As with any innovation, using OI for IoT may require substantial changes. These are among the challenges organizations face as they consider adopting operational intelligence:

• They find it difficult to evaluate the business value of enabling real-time sensing of data and event streams using identification tags, agents and other systems embedded not only in physical locations like warehouses but also in business processes, networks, mobile devices, data appliances and other technologies.
• They lack an IT architecture that can support and integrate these systems as the volume and frequency of information increase.
• They are uncertain how to set reasonable business and IT expectations, priorities and implementation plans for important technologies that may conflict or overlap. These can include business intelligence, event processing, business process management, rules management, network upgrades and new or modified applications and databases.
• They don’t understand how to create a personalized user experience that enables nontechnical employees in different roles to monitor data or event streams, identify significant changes, quickly understand the correlation between events and develop a context in which to determine the right decisions or actions to take.

Ventana Research has announced new benchmark research on The Internet of Things and Operational Intelligence that will identify trends and best practices associated with this technology and these processes. It will explore organizations’ experiences with initiatives related to events and data and with attempts to align IT projects, resources and spending with new business objectives that demand real-time intelligence and event-driven architectures. The research will investigate how organizations are increasing their responsiveness to events by rebalancing the roles of networks, applications and databases to reduce latency; it also will explore ways in which they are using sensor data and alerts to anticipate problematic events. We will benchmark the performance of organizations’ implementations, including IoT, event stream processing, event and activity monitoring, alerting, event modeling and workflow, and process and rules management.

As operational intelligence evolves as the core of IoT platforms, it is an important time to take a closer look at this emerging opportunity and challenge. For those interested in learning more or becoming involved in this upcoming research, please let me know.

Regards,

Tony Cosentino

VP and Research Director