Business intelligence (BI), once a competitive differentiator, is now a commodity. Most companies have implemented BI solutions that provide historical reporting, dashboarding, metrics and scorecarding for past events. Companies know what has happened but the ability to know what will happen will be the competitive advantage that companies need to excel in this volatile and ultra-competitive environment. Predictability is the next step in the evolutionary process of Business Intelligence.
Traditional Business Intelligence and data warehousing focus on strategic, long term decision support. While strategic Business Intelligence continues to be a requirement to support long range vision, Predictive Business Intelligence (PBI) takes business Intelligence beyond a process that has traditionally looked backwards and has been reactive in nature. PBI empowers the enterprise in realizing competitive advantages and provides the business with the necessary agility to meet the challenges of today’s rapidly changing business environment by mitigating risks and maximizing opportunities. PBI greatly improves both long term strategic decision making and near team operational decisions.
The ability to make Predictive strategic decisions will separate enabled companies from their competition enabling them to capitalize on opportunities and reduce exposure to risk. Statistical analysis on operational and transactional data will provide insightful information on business trends and enable the business to make strategic decisions quickly and more effectively. For example, when a retail chain is determining whether to establish a presence in an unfamiliar territory, it could utilize growth data from other locations and combine it with the local data as well as current projection data to provide support for the decision making. The data might be sketchy and sparse, but statistical analysis will offer a sound basis for decision making. Other examples can be found in oil & gas exploration or pharmaceutical development projects for instance. These projects often entail long development cycles and considerable up-front cost the outcome of which has significant impact on the overall performance of the business. Predictive decision making will enable those companies to analyze more data in order to gain a complete view of the business cases and leverage proven statistical models to aid those impactful decisions. The completeness and quality of the data analyzed are critical to determine the accuracy of the prediction. Although companies in these verticals go to great lengths to develop elaborate risk management models to address common concerns, predictive business intelligence In support of existing risk management processes, provides a richer set of data and more interactive analysis to ensure a better outcome.