My last blog post about the Analytics Camp 2010 conference relates to Farhad Islam's talk about "Real-Time Analytics, Getting results when you need it". Farhad proposed that changes must occur not only at the Business Intelligence vendor level, but also to both operating systems and hardware to increase response time of analytical requests. He stated that business intelligence vendors are already experts in addressing the data consolidation and analysis components, however they don't consider the user interaction component.

First, the main contributor to business intelligence system implementation success is NOT related to the vendors functionality but to the business intelligence implementers and administrators themselves. This dependence on individuals causes BI to be limited to human capabilities, including all the associated errors & delays.

Second, business intelligence vendors must take into account the utilization of reports and ad-hoc queries. If the vendor's product can complete analysis on the requests actually being made, it could then use these results to accomplish improvements in real-time response time. His suggestion is that the systems should dynamically and automatically analyze the frequency of similar calculations so that additional requests of the same nature are addressed immediately without waiting for the system to complete the same query again.

Also, Farhad reminded us that it is important to keep priority in consideration and use it to modify the query queue dynamically. Information on the person's level in the company, the work they are doing, the time of day, the processing length of the request, etc should all be used to ensure that the processing is working effectively toward the benefit of BI users. You wouldn't want the CEO of the company, who is on the phone with a customer, to have to wait even 1 minute to get a response.