posted 12/15/2010 by MarkGStacey - Views: [2501]
I've recently started doing the round-up for IT Web's BI newsletter, and (with permission), I'm cross-posting the content here for those who don't subcribe:
The Business Intelligence community needs to become more aware of real world data, based on sensor feeds.
Business Intelligence has traditionally been used on pure IT systems - starting with financial systems, growing through ERP, and expanding into new fields all the time, such as clickstream analysis.
Until recently, data sources in BI systems have mostly been from IT systems - this is changing as more and more of the world is plugged into systems by using sensors, radio frequency tags and even video monitoring. As this data becomes available, more and more use cases have become evident, and the challenges inherent in this field have become more obvious.
Some of these use cases include the optimisation of packages being transported, or the maintenance schedules on machinery, making these plans proactive based on actual use rather than assumptions, and can easily cut costs dramatically.
However, the sheer volume of data generated by sensor feeds quickly becomes overwhelming for all but the largest of systems and new methods of analysing the data "in flight"- in other words, before it is saved to disk - need to be developed.
While there are some players in the market, it has yet to become a mainstream use of BI – however, with applications in energy conservation, manufacturing process optimisation, and proactive maintenance, this is one of the bigger growth fields in BI in the coming years.