Intelligent Business Analytics: Need, Functioning, Challenges, and Implications

Introduction

Data science is one of the hottest subjects for more than a decade in all most all the organizations including industrial, businesses, and government and non-governments, which continue its demand for a few more decades. In the past few years, organizations are generating a lot of data and get started focusing on data to gain more meaningful insights to make innovative and intelligent decisions for not only the growth of the business but also to improve the business performance. Most commonly, the data generated by the organizations includes information about their customers, suppliers, marketing, sales, accounts, finance, and operations. In a digital world, organizations are transforming digitally and generating larger volumes of data. Now the challenge is to make use of the data. Thus, organizations are focusing on data analysis in order to get insights from the data because of changing business functioning. According to the Oxford dictionary, the term analysis refers to “the detailed study or examination of something to understand more about it” whereas analytics refers to “a careful and complete analysis of data using a model, usually performed by a computer”. The term analytics referring to data analytics which finds variety of applications in business; thus, it is also commonly referred as business data analytics. In the business, analytics applications include but not limited to market analysis, sales analysis, market forecasting, strategic planning and financial analysis, customer analytics. The goal of this chapter is to present the need, functioning, challenges, opportunities, and implications of Intelligent Big Data Analytics in a digital world.

Business Intelligence (BI) solution can combine data from multiple sources and analysing a business's data and allows organization to see the big picture and facilitate better business decisions. Organizations adopt BI and analytics tools majorly to benefit the organization in terms of better business decisions at strategic levels, including but not limited to the financial planning, marketing, sales, understanding customers, and operational efficiency. In the early days, BI was available in offline mode which is accessible to limited strategic users mainly for decision-making. The later version of BI was evolved as Operational BI this extends insights from data to all the levels of users in the organization, including strategic, tactical, and operational users for their decision-making. Additionally, organizations have been leveraging the use of Operational BI (Sarma, 2018) for their strategic, tactical use and proliferating into low level decision making for smooth running of business operations.

The need and usage of BI systems for operational decision making has significantly increased for a timely decision to all users in the organisations. Further, an Operational BI is not merely a simple combination of operational and BI systems, but this constitutes the whole complex set of components that cover overall functionalities from the storage, process, monitor, visualize, and delivery of information to form an operational BI ecosystem. Besides, Operational BI is a unified business information system that provides a real-time decision-making information to all the users in the organization including operational, tactical, and strategic. According to a study (Sarma, 2021), an Operational BI ecosystem consists of five key components namely Business Process Monitoring (BPM), Event Monitoring and Notification (EMN), Operational Analytics (OA), Operational Reporting (OR), and Portal. BPM provides configuring and measuring performance of various operational, business and process parameters, while the EMN component delivers the right message to the right person at the right time. The component, OA will provide analytical functionalities such as extraction of knowledge and updates the available knowledge repositories, whereas OR present information in real-time to the users that describes what is happening at the present time.