By Bob Gourley
My formative years (career-wise) were spent doing something in the US Navy called OPINTEL for “Operational Intelligence.” It is a type of intelligence that had its roots in the anti-submarine warfare missions of World War II’s Battle of the Atlantic, where all sources of information had to be brought together to form assessments of very dynamic situations. By the time I was involved the Cold War was still raging and OPINTEL had been refined to an art and science of bringing all relevant information together, including information from historical archives plus ongoing activities. The lessons I learned back then I carry with me today and I’m amazed at how this methodology is now in place in almost every workplace I visit. Everyone today must be their own operational analyst. Life today is a continuous assessment of dynamic information. Every business leader and every decision maker in most every job must deal with large quantities of ambiguous information in a wide variety of formats that are generally hard to bring together to analyze together.
In the old days we sought to do our operational intelligence using computer based maps and charts and we engineered solutions that helped us get the data into one place. But as you can imagine the old systems tool years to design and when they were fielded they were already out of date. Today’s approaches must be agile and flexible. Additionally, data rates and volumes of data have skyrocketed. Modern systems must be almost infinitely scalable. And since modern systems must serve entire organizations they must be incredibly economical.
So the world of operational intelligence has really changed.
Keep that in mind as I describe a webinar update I had today. Michael Barros of JackBe walked me through an update on their technology that left me amazed and inspired.
I’ve tracked JackBe for years and have long been a fan of their CTO John Crupi and the rest of the leadership team there. I’ve had plenty of demos of their capability and have long appreciated their ability to empower developers and programmers and even power users with the ability to rapidly pull together information from multiple sources into comprehensive displays. But they continue to enhance their capabilities to the point where I was totally surprised at what they can do. Through well thought out engineering they are able to bring data together from virtually any source, in real time, and act on in in memory, keeping these actions so fast that the end result to analysts remains, in real time (really really fast).
From their website:
JackBe is the leading provider of Real-Time Operational Intelligence software, the newest segment of Business Intelligence (BI) analytics. JackBe’s platform, Presto, gives companies the real-time tools they need to assess the business impact of changing conditions as they happen. By combining operational metrics from multiple live sources—including other BI systems—into easy-to-use dashboards, JackBe arms decision makers with the data they need to “know what’s happening now.”
Organizations that depend on “information in motion” benefit from Presto’s fast assembly, allowing users to create new visualizations from disparate data sources in hours—or even minutes. Users benefit from Presto’s self-service BI approach, granting non-technical users access to data with less dependence on IT. Users benefit from Presto’s social integration, promoting collaboration through sharing dashboards, leveraging others’ work and running apps unchanged in SharePoint, portals andmobile devices. And, Presto offers end-to-end security preserving IT governance and reducing risk.
Operational managers need immediate visibility into the metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that reveal business impact. The operational intelligence required to provide those KPIs doesn’t reside in a single data source. Presto affords simplicity and flexibility in mashing live data feeds from a wide variety of enterprise BI sources to produce analytics for real-time decision making. Whether business intelligence lives in databases, warehouses, web services, social media—or Excel spreadsheets—Presto reduces the complexity of turning this disparate data into actionable, visual intelligence. Decision windows get shorter all the time. Presto provides the tools to be more informed, relevant and responsive to changes that affect the business and its customers—as they happen.
For an overview of one of the many ways you can use JackBe, see:
My recommendation: plug in with JackBe today and ask them for a demo of their Presto solution. Ask how they can work with your existing infrastructure and existing data to make a difference for your workforce.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.