As corporations move rapidly toward deploying e-business systems, the lack of business intelligence facilities in these systems prevents decision makers from exploiting the full potential of the Internet as a sales, marketing, and support channel. To solve this problem, vendors are rapidly enhancing their business intelligence offerings to capture the data flowing through e-business systems and integrate it with the information that traditional decision-making systems manage and analyze. These enhanced business intelligence—or e-intelligence—systems may provide significant business benefits to traditional brick-and-mortar companies as well as new dot-com ones as they build e-business environments. Organizations have been successfully using decision processing products, including data warehouse and business intelligence tools, for the past several years to optimize day-to-day business operations and to leverage enterprise-wide corporate data for a competitive advantage. The advent of the Internet and corporate extra nets has propelled many of these organizations toward the use of e business applications to further improve business efficiency, decrease costs and increase revenues - and to compete with new dot.com companies appearing in the marketplace. The explosive growth in the use of e-business has led to the need for decision-processing systems to be enhanced to capture and integrate business information flowing through e-business systems. These systems also need to be able to apply business intelligence techniques to this captured-business information. These enhanced decision processing systems, or E-Intelligence, have the potential to provide significant business benefits to both traditional bricks-and-mortar companies and new dot.com companies as they begin to exploit the power of e-business processing.
E-INTELLIGENCE FOR BUSINESS
E-intelligence systems provide internal
business users, trading partners, and corporate clients rapid and easy access
to the e-business information, applications, and services they need in order to
compete effectively and satisfy customer needs. They offer many
business benefits to organizations in exploiting the power of the Internet. For
example, e-intelligence systems give the organization the ability to:
•Integrate e-business operations into the
traditional business environment, giving business users a complete view of all
corporate business operations and information.
•Help business users make informed
decisions based on accurate and consistent e business information that is
collected and integrated from e-business applications. This business
information helps business users optimize Web-based offerings (products
offered, pricing and promotions, service and support, and so on) to match marketplace
requirements and analyze business performance with respect to competitors and
the organization’s business-performance objectives.
•Assist e-business applications in
profiling and segmenting e-business customers. Based on this information,
businesses can personalize their Web pages and the products and services they
offer.
•Extend the business intelligence
environment outside the corporate firewall, helping the organization share
internal business information with trading partners. Sharing this information
will let it optimize the product supply chain to match the demand for products
sold through the Internet and minimizes the costs of maintaining inventory.
•Extend the business intelligence
environment outside the corporate firewall to key corporate clients, giving
them access to business information about their accounts. With this
information, clients can analyze and tune their business relationships with other
organization, improving client service and satisfaction.
•Link e-business applications with
business intelligence and collaborative processing applications, allowing
internal and external users to seamlessly move among different systems.
INTELLIGENT E-SERVICES
The building blocks of new, sophisticated,
intelligent data warehousing applications are now intelligent e-services. An
e-service is any asset made available via the Internet to drive
new revenue streams or create new efficiencies. What makes e-services
valuable is not only the immediacy of the service, but also the intelligence
behind the service. While traditional data warehousing meant simple business
rules, simple queries and pro-active work to take advantage of the Web,
E-Intelligence is much more sophisticated and enables the Web to work on our behalf.
Combining intelligence with e-services promises exciting business opportunities.
E-INTELLIGENCE REQUIREMENTS
An e-intelligence system builds on and
extends existing business intelligence tools and applications, including
enterprise information portals (EIPs). Figure 1 outlines the architecture of an
e-intelligence system and provides examples of the business intelligence
capabilities an organization should seek in such a system, including:
•One-to-one e-marketing analysis
applications that customize and personalize information, applications,
services, and products offered to consumers and clients via the Internet
•Content, customer, and
merchandise-analysis applications that track and analyze how users navigate the
organization’s e-business sites and use applications to buy products
•Channel and cross-channel analysis and
campaign applications that measure and analyze the success of the Internet as a
sales, marketing, and services channel
•Supply-chain analysis applications that
let the organization work with trading partners in optimizing the product
supply chain to match the demand for products sold through the Internet
•A simple and integrated e-intelligence
Web interface to give internal and external Web users and applications secure,
managed access to the organization’s business information, applications, and
services
•Demand-driven business intelligence
gathering and analysis, and real-time
decisions and recommendations as consumers
and clients interact with e-business systems via the Internet.
