Operational System Metadata glues Business Intelligence with Collaboration, Decision and Action

With the increasing need to enable ‘collaboration’ and to automate ‘actions’ in the decision making process, the integration of Business Intelligence environment with Operational System Metadata is much more critical now.

The metadata from an operational system that will be required are the following two items

1. Inventory of business process in the system

2. The list of data elements that participate in a business process

The Operational System Metadata is then integrated into the BI environment at three levels.

• The list of metrics in a BI environment is mapped to the applicable business processes with their definition. For example if the metric in focus for analysis is Human Resource Headcount Growth Percentage, some of the processes that can be associated with this metric are Hire Request or Stop Hire.

• At a second level the metric should also have integration to list all unconnected processes, especially for senior management who can delegate tasks.

• Each of the business processes linked to a metric should also be actionable in such a way that the processes can be invoked. The data elements dimension/fact which are present defining the ‘metric’ in the context should be linked as parameters to the business process that needs to be invoked.

• Metadata level integration of the BI environment with the Operational environment will ensure easier and effective collaboration of the users.