Most organizations have already established and incorporated Business Intelligence systems. In the last three years we observe a growing trend of making decision support BI systems used by management, available for the entire organization’s operational levels driving them to act in synergy with the organizational strategy. According to a new research by Cutter, the number of organizations who implemented Operational BI was tripled in the last three years and reached 18%.
How can this trend be used to help accelerate the overall organization performance?

The leading organizations have long ago built BI systems providing managerial information for decision making support; Corporate Performance Management systems which translate the organization's strategy into frequently controlled objectives and analytical models which provide perditions and explanations on various business occurrences. These systems provide business insights which are essential for improving the decision making process quality of organization's leaders.

However, the influence of these systems on the entire organization is limited, since usage is confined to the company's managers, analysts, marketing staff and a few others. In addition, the systems are based on information which is not updated in real time. As a result: the field levels, service people, branch managers and such, use only operational systems. The operational systems provide information on the current activity (for example: sale to a customer) and do not include the broad business context. Meaning, there is a gap between the BI systems operating on the strategic and control level and the operational systems operating at the individual event level.

In order to achieve real business value utilization from the organizational information, integration has to be formed between the insights, trends, patterns and context of the information on one hand and the field events on the other hand. In order to meet the challenge of turning insights into action, the following principles have to be filled:
Tightening the connection between management and the field by using an interactive system, real time translation of significant chain of events into phenomena, giving a precise action instruction to the most relevant factor in the organization, close connection between the organization's processes and the information flow within it.

There are three levels of implementation:

Basic level: Distributed Business Intelligence
Creating BI systems which are implemented within the operational and control ranks displaying the relevant dashboard to the user. For example, in Clalit Health Services (the largest HMO in Israel) a digital dashboard was implemented which was adjusted not only for management use but also for the various field operatives, among which were hundreds of clinics and hospital wards' managers. The result was a strategic decentralization process of one of the largest budgets in the country into hundreds and even thousands of managers – who truly know the filed, receive relevant information, guidance / policies / objectives from management in real time and are capable of criticizing themselves without assistance from intermediate factors.

Intermediate level: Analytical Business Process Management
Many organizations have started to operate and control the organizational processes using Workflow systems, the new generation of which is Business Process Management (BPM) systems. These systems allow for processes automation; standardization, knowledge preservation; faults reduction; efficiency increase and more.
Incorporating BI systems with BPM systems will lead to higher contribution to the organization. Implementing information from the BI systems in BPM processes will enable the creation of a dynamic set of processes which will be sensitive to organizational information.
For example, A cellular company service representative who take a call from an angry customer claiming that the rates he is paying are too high. Theoretically if instead of a service representative, this call were to be answered by the Marketing VP, who is familiar with the organization's goals; with customers segments value; who has all the relevant information regarding the customer including vulnerability analysis; alternatives rates packages and customer preferences – the answer to the customer would have been optimal and different from one customer to another. As a result, customer retention will improve and become qualified; fast; tailored to the customer and cheaper from standard procedures and rules. In fact, we have transformed the shortest-career, lowest salary worker in the organization to the most contributing worker (much like the VP of Marketing) when it comes to the most valuable asset to the organization – the customer.

High level: Event Broadcasting/Business Activity Monitoring
Real time monitoring of events enables to flatten the organization and manage it both at the general and individual levels. Most managers are capable of making decisions according to averages and large groups. For example, in the north there was a 10% drop in dairy products sales. This kind of event can be rapidly dealt with in the BI system. However, what if only one item's sales were dropped in three branches, due to a competitor's campaign in the region? In this case the events will be concealed behind a normal average.
For example, Tnuva implemented a system named Verix which creates a statistical model of products' sale behavior. Any diversion will lead to a chain of occurrences which will be detected by the system, screened for influencing events and sent to the most relevant person in the organization for handling.
Another example, Unilever implemented a system named BSignal which connects to the organizational SAS system. With the assistance of company managers exceptional events were defined, and thus in real time it is possible to locate a new purchase by a customer who is late in paying for his prior purchases, while prompting a window from the operational system for follow up.  In this way we enable managers of all levels to define (using rules or statistical methods) the general and the exceptional, receive warnings in real time and make immediate decisions.

Technological Challenges
Implementing Operation BI makes us deal with some complex technological challenges:

• Acquiring data in real time.
• Connecting between the operational systems and the BPM and BI systems.
• Incorporating historical data and real time data.
• Integrating Enterprise Information Integration (EII) systems of ETL doctrine with Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) processes.
• Data integrity. Though it is not a technological challenge, due to bringing the systems into the field for immediate action, erroneous data should be close to zero.