A Generic Functional Architecture for Operational BI System

Introduction

In recent years, Operational Business Intelligence is emerged as an important trend in the Business Intelligence (BI) market (Ulrich Christ, 2009). Modern business demands proliferation of decision making into low level operational users in the organization for smooth running of business operations whereas in the past, BI was used for strategic and tactical decision-making purposes (Whatson, 2005). Operational BI refers to the application of BI methods and technology to the vast number of low-level decisions to be taken in the daily operations of a business (Colin White, 2006). In early 2000s Operational BI was considered as a part of enterprise data warehouse system that merely loading operational data into data warehouse and used for operational reporting. Nowadays, the usage Operational BI is rapidly increasing and continues their usage further two more decades. Developing a generic functional architecture for Operational BI using software architectural design principles is found open research area which motivates us to write this paper.

Most of the reported BI architectures (Liya, Barashl & Bartolini, 2006; An, Yan & Tong, 2007; Bhensdadia & Kosta, 2010; Akbay, 2006; Auth, Von Maur & Helfert, 2002; Melchert, Schwinn, Herrmann & Winter, 2005; Rajesh & Ramesh, 2016; Passlick, Lebek, & Breitner, 2017) were mainly dealt traditional architectural aspects and less-focused on Operational BI functionality. Traditional BI software architectures have found several limitations like tightly coupled which means no functional decomposition of modules because of cohesiveness, and functionality mostly confined to Data warehouse architectures and their paraphernalia. Second, they are historic that means does not provide decision making from real time data and subjective in nature. Third, lack of business processes and services performance measurements. Fourth, accessible to very limited number of users in the organizations for strategic decision making. Finally, support limited functional features of modules like data mining, analytical processing, querying and reporting. Operational BI systems are dynamic in nature, event centric, include both functional as well as subjective features which supports real time BI for all types of users in the organization for decision making.