The Rise of Operational Analytics

Chapter 2. The Rise of Operational Analytics

Decision Making at the Speed of Business

Companies today need to make informed decisions regarding the minute-to-minute behavior of their business. Gone are the days of waiting for weeks between progress reports, which were generated laboriously and then shipped off to recipients for semi-manual analysis. Even nightly reports delivered the next business day are often out-of-date when considering what is currently happening within daily business operations. Bottom line, the faster you can make an informed decision, the faster you can provide value to your internal and external stakeholders.

Over the past decade or two, the shift from batch to real-time data processing has been a pivotal trend. The result? New platforms and frameworks that bring near-real-time processing speeds while preserving the advantages of tried and true frameworks.

The shift has been increasing in momentum due to the lower cost of running cloud-based resources (such as servers and databases), the widespread availability of well-maintained and well-documented open source frameworks, as well as demand by both businesses and consumers to move faster and smarter.

Companies today are indeed making faster decisions, using the capabilities described in this report. By doing so, they are out-competing their peers. Let’s take a look at how this transformation began.

The Emergence of Operational Analytics

Tools that enable streaming data have helped to redefine how organizations ...