Services for Organizations

Using our research, best practices and expertise, we help you understand how to optimize your business processes using applications, information and technology. We provide advisory, education, and assessment services to rapidly identify and prioritize areas for improvement and perform vendor selection

Consulting & Strategy Sessions

Ventana On Demand

    Services for Investment Firms

    We provide guidance using our market research and expertise to significantly improve your marketing, sales and product efforts. We offer a portfolio of advisory, research, thought leadership and digital education services to help optimize market strategy, planning and execution.

    Consulting & Strategy Sessions

    Ventana On Demand

      Services for Technology Vendors

      We provide guidance using our market research and expertise to significantly improve your marketing, sales and product efforts. We offer a portfolio of advisory, research, thought leadership and digital education services to help optimize market strategy, planning and execution.

      Analyst Relations

      Demand Generation

      Product Marketing

      Market Coverage

      Request a Briefing


        Ventana Research Analyst Perspectives

        << Back to Blog Index

        IoT Invigorates Operational Intelligence

        The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) extends digital connectivity to devices and sensors in homes, businesses, vehicles and potentially almost anywhere. This innovation enables devices designed for it to generate and transmit data about their operations; analytics using this data can facilitate monitoring and a range of automatic functions.vr_oi_goals_of_using_operational_intelligence_updated

        To perform these functions IoT requires what Ventana Research calls Operational Intelligence (OI), a discipline that has evolved from the capture and analysis of instrumentation, networking and machine-to-machine interactions of many types. We define operational intelligence as a set of event-centered information and analytic processes operating across an organization that enable people to use that event information to take effective actions and make optimal decisions. Our benchmark research into Operational Intelligence shows that organizations most often want to use such event-centric architectures for defining metrics (37%) and assigning thresholds for alerts (35%) and for more action-oriented processes of sending notifications to users (33%) and linking events to activities (27%).

        In many industries, organizations can gain competitive advantage if they can reduce the elapsed time between an event occurring and actions taken or decisions made in response to it. Existing business intelligence (BI) tools provide useful analysis of and reporting on data drawn from previously recorded transactions, but to improve competitiveness and maximize efficiencies organizations are concluding that employees and processes – in IT, business operations and front-line customer sales, service and support – also need to be able to detect and respond to events as they happen. Our research into big data integration shows that nearly one in four companies currently integrate data into big data stores in real time. The challenge is to go further and act upon both the data that is stored and the data that is streaming in a timely manner.

        The evolution of operational intelligence, especially in conjunction with IoT, is encouraging companies to revisit their priorities and spending for information technology and application management. However, sorting out the range of options poses a challenge for both business and IT leaders. Some see potential value in expanding their network infrastructure to support OI. Others are implementing event processing (EP) systems that employ new technology to detect meaningful patterns, anomalies and relationships among events. Increasingly, organizations are using dashboards, visualization and modeling to notify nontechnical people of events and enable them to understand their significance and take appropriate and immediate action.

        As with any innovation, using OI for IoT may require substantial changes. These are among the challenges organizations face as they consider adopting operational intelligence:

        • They find it difficult to evaluate the business value of enabling real-time sensing of data and event streams using identification tags, agents and other systems embedded not only in physical locations like warehouses but also in business processes, networks, mobile devices, data appliances and other technologies.
        • They lack an IT architecture that can support and integrate these systems as the volume and frequency of information increase.
        • They are uncertain how to set reasonable business and IT expectations, priorities and implementation plans for important technologies that may conflict or overlap. These can include business intelligence, event processing, business process management, rules management, network upgrades and new or modified applications and databases.
        • They don’t understand how to create a personalized user experience that enables nontechnical employees in different roles to monitor data or event streams, identify significant changes, quickly understand the correlation between events and develop a context in which to determine the right decisions or actions to take.

        Ventana Research has announced new benchmark research on The Internet of Things and Operational Intelligence that will identify trends and best practices associated with this technology and these processes. It will explore organizations’ experiences with initiatives related to events and data and with attempts to align IT projects, resources and spending with new business objectives that demand real-time intelligence and event-driven architectures. The research will investigate how organizations are increasing their responsiveness to events by rebalancing the roles of networks, applications and databases to reduce latency; it also will explore ways in which they are using sensor data and alerts to anticipate problematic events. We will benchmark the performance of organizations’ implementations, including IoT, event stream processing, event and activity monitoring, alerting, event modeling and workflow, and process and rules management.

        As operational intelligence evolves as the core of IoT platforms, it is an important time to take a closer look at this emerging opportunity and challenge. For those interested in learning more or becoming involved in this upcoming research, please let me know.

        Regards,

        Tony Cosentino

        VP and Research Director

        Authors:

        Ventana Research

        Ventana Research, now part of Information Services Group (ISG), is the most authoritative and respected market research and advisory services firm focused on improving business outcomes through optimal use of people, processes, information and technology. Since our beginning, our goal has been to provide insight and expert guidance on mainstream and disruptive technologies. In short, we want to help you become smarter and find the most relevant technology to accelerate your organization's goals.

        JOIN OUR COMMUNITY

        Our Analyst Perspective Policy

        • Ventana Research’s Analyst Perspectives are fact-based analysis and guidance on business, industry and technology vendor trends. Each Analyst Perspective presents the view of the analyst who is an established subject matter expert on new developments, business and technology trends, findings from our research, or best practice insights.

          Each is prepared and reviewed in accordance with Ventana Research’s strict standards for accuracy and objectivity and reviewed to ensure it delivers reliable and actionable insights. It is reviewed and edited by research management and is approved by the Chief Research Officer; no individual or organization outside of Ventana Research reviews any Analyst Perspective before it is published. If you have any issue with an Analyst Perspective, please email them to ChiefResearchOfficer@ventanaresearch.com

        View Policy

        Subscribe to Email Updates

        Posts by Month

        see all

        Posts by Topic

        see all


        Analyst Perspectives Archive

        See All