Practically every motorist has noticed the disclaimer: "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear." Drivers are advised to recognize that what appears to be the reality is in fact distorted. In other words, don't try passing because that tractor trailer is closing in on your rear even though it looks like its 30 yards behind you.

Users face a similar issue with the information that drives their organization's decisions, tactics, and strategies. Despite your IT department's best efforts, chances are the information at your disposal is dated and distorted.

Over the past decade, organizations have steadily deployed business intelligence (BI) software to equip decision makers and analysts with better, more reliable data. The payoff has been enormous, and while other IT sectors have suffered, companies' investment in BI remains strong.

Yet problems remain. Room for improvement is ample. By and large, BI provides a rear view mirror look at historical data. Now on the horizon is Web services, a technology fabric that can help BI realize its potential as a catalyst for proactive decision making among users driven from accurate, comprehensive and real-time information from all corners of the enterprise.

As performance management becomes linked with operations, business intelligence itself is moving ever closer to operations. By analyzing real-time data, feedback and input to operations, managers can be immediate and leave an impact. Performance management is also penetrating to lower levels. Effective business managers are pushing the decision point down so that decisions are made as close to the customer as possible.

While traditional BI solutions focus on strategic planning, operational BI is a newer form of BI that empowers executives, managers and professionals across the enterprise. Operationally focused BI provides access to both dynamic (transactional) and static (historical) data in a real-time environment

Raising the Stakes
Web services, as you have probably read, is fundamentally about interoperability. It's fast emerging as a means of application-to-application communication to serve such practical purposes as automated replenishment from inventory once stock falls below a threshold.

With Web services, BI capitalizes on that data integration foundation to address several weaknesses in the conventional BI systems and build on the success that users worldwide have already realized from the query, reporting and analysis of data. Forward-thinking enterprises view Web services as a framework for pervasive enterprise BI that provides: Faster, real-time access to dynamic information;

instantaneous reach into broad network of incompatible data systems;
proactive decision-making vs rear view mirror look at historical data;
broader reach of analytics to more users;
metrics-driven performance measurement, management, and alerting;
and data exchange and analysis among related functions (supply chain, marketing, finance, sales, etc.)

These have been the objectives of business intelligence and data warehousing for a number of years. Typically, the approach has been to use a platform for data integration (sometimes called an extraction, transformation and loading tool) to move data into a central repository-a data warehouse. From there, users access and analyze the information with a front-end BI tool.

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