Enabling Right-Time Insight For Performance Management

Delivering information you can trustSeptember 2008
Enabling right-time
insight for performance
management Delivering information you can trustPage 2
Performance management has evolved from the traditional areas of business Contents intelligence (BI) and planning-assessing trends, patterns and comparisons-to delivering insights that align goals and strategic metrics and supporting 3 Detecting and delivering the right intra-day, operational activities. Today, performance management supports all transactions functional areas of an organization, from the front-line worker to the mid-level 5 Continuous business monitoring manager to the executive officer, and each one wants information appropriate with IBM Cognos Now! for the decision at hand.7 Departmental reporting with IBM Cognos 8 Reporting and Analysis To meet these demands, BI applications require data that can:8 Providing BI-ready data 10 Conclusion . Deliver information in the "right" decision window for the targeted decision maker. Support a continuous line of sight across the organization, so information about a single event can be consistently viewed by any employee or system
For example, Costco monitors customer purchases to promote its Executive Membership program. If a customer exceeds a year-to-date purchase threshold, a supervisor is alerted and, while the customer is still at the register, can inform the customer that a membership upgrade offer and special gift are available at the service desk. The service desk clerk has access to the same customer purchase history and can immediately communicate the benefits associated with Executive Membership.
This example shows how critical it is to identify key business events and use that information to activate appropriate business processes as quickly as possible. Organizations need to detect transactions of particular interest and update the supporting data sources in real time, potentially inside the normal update window, so they can be used to drive business decisions at a moment's notice. Delivering information you can trustPage 3
Detecting and delivering the right transactionsA mature BI environment often utilizes different kinds of data stores to support the information windows required by the enterprise. These data stores can include:
. In-memory data stores for continuous, real-time monitoring and intra-day reporting. Operational data stores for departmental or functional reporting or analysis. An enterprise data warehouse for corporate performance management activities such as company-wide planning, metrics, reporting and analysis
A key challenge involves getting transactional data into these data stores without impacting the transactional application where the data resides. IBM® InfoSphereT Change Data Capture (CDC) is able to monitor transaction data and detect the "right" information to pass to the business intelligence data sources without impacting the performance of the transaction application because it monitors only the transaction log files, not the database tables.
Native database log-file reading is one of the least intrusive and most scalable monitoring options. Databases write to their database logs by default, so no changes to existing systems are required to recognize and propagate business events. Any data changes-whether an insert, update or delete-are detected as they occur and delivered in the correct sequence and order to ensure data integrity.Delivering information you can trustPage 4
Often, the source systems where the data resides are already overburdened with heavy processing activity from other applications. Any solution added to capture data changes cannot introduce risk to critical business systems, including impacting database performance and CPU utilization or altering existing IT infrastructure. IBM InfoSphere CDC does not require large amounts of system resources for capturing and processing changes, nor does it require the purchase of new hardware or software components. This approach means that IBM InfoSphere CDC can fit into existing environments with no additional risk or systems impact (see Figure 1). The real-time transaction stream provided by IBM InfoSphere CDC helps improve the timeliness of the information available to BI tools like IBM Cognos 8 solutions, enhancing the ability of decision makers at every level to see and react to business events.
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