DELIVERING ACTIONABLE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
THROUGH SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE
Zeljko Panian
Faculty of Economics and Business, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia
Keywords: Business intelligence, Web services, Service-oriented Architecture, interoperability, operational business
intelligence, real-time enterprise.
Abstract: The paper discusses the main characteristics of Service-oriented Architecture and examines the feasible
ways of using business intelligence solutions as Web services in an SOA environment. With the evolution
of Web services, organizations are becoming more sophisticated in their goals for and requirements of this
technology as it offers faster and more flexible deployment, customization and easy integration of BI
solutions. Those organizations that choose a Web services strategy will be best positioned to deliver BI
content across and beyond the enterprise, making BI accessible to everyone, wherever they work, at a lower
cost and in more innovative ways.
1 INTRODUCTION
Service-oriented architecture (SOA) concept and
implementations have increased in popularity over
the last few years due to the promise this approach
holds for reducing development and maintenance
cost and making it easy to integrate disparate
information processes. SOA concepts are primarily
designed to achieve the vision of an agile, possibly
real-time enterprise with a flexible IT infrastructure
that enables a business to respond to changes in the
best possible way (Fersht, 2004).
On the other hand, business intelligence (BI)
allows organizations to access, analyze, and share
information and knowledge. This helps them to
track, understand, target and manage their business
in order to improve enterprise performance.
2 THE NEED FOR ACTIONABLE
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Business intelligence system is a key component of
companies’ IT frameworks. It is a component that
enables business users to report on, analyze and
optimize business processes and operations to
reduce costs and increase revenues. Most companies
use this component for strategic decisions making
where decision-making cycle may span a time
period of several months (e.g., marketing campaign
preparation or improving customer satisfaction).
At the same time that companies see business
intelligence playing a strategic role, they also want
to be able to use insights gained from their data for
more tactical decision-making purposes. Enterprise
value analytical capabilities, but they also want to be
able to take action (Smith, 2003). Interest in
dashboards and scorecards has surged because
companies want to monitor their performance, but
now they wish to take that information to the next
step and determine how to act on it.
Defining business rules can help these companies
develop step-by-step instructions on how to respond
to the data they are getting from their supply chain
and incorporate those instructions into their business
intelligence and data warehouse systems. BI has a
role to play in the operational functioning of the
enterprise as well as the determination of its
strategic direction.
Competitive pressures are forcing companies to
react faster to changing business conditions and
customer requirements. As a result, there is now a
need to use BI to help drive and optimize business
processes and operations on daily basis, and, in
some cases, even for intraday decision making. This
type of BI is usually called operational business
intelligence (Blasum, 2006). The objective of
operational BI is to make more timely business
191
Panian Z. (2008).
DELIVERING ACTIONABLE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE THROUGH SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE.
In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - ISAS, pages 191-194
DOI: 10.5220/0001676701910194
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

decisions, and, therefore, if has a close relationship
to the subject of real-time BI processing.
3 ABOUT SERVICE-ORIENTED
ARCHITECTURES
3.1 The Service-Oriented Architecture
Basics
The service-oriented architecture (SOA) has been
held out for nearly two decades as a substantially
more cost-effective and flexible strategy for
constructing enterprise software systems than
historical approaches including monolithic system
design and tightly coupled client server models
(Newcomer, 2002). Many IT professionals and
industry observers believe Web services technology,
and the unprecedented universal vendor support of
the underlying standards, will finally make practical
the widespread adoption of the SOA approach.
In the past, enterprise software systems were
complex, monolithic behemoths. The complexity of
these systems made them difficult to fully
understand and therefore leverage. There were
limited integration points allowing reuse of the
embodied business information and processes. This
resulted in islands of automation with costly
duplication of information across systems.
Information flows between applications were
limited, preventing the delivery of information to the
people and systems that could best utilize it.
Even more damaging to the organization, these
systems were difficult to change. Modifications,
upgrades and enhancements were time consuming,
costly and risky. Since these systems embodied the
business processes of the organization, IT frequently
became the bottleneck in attempts to adapt the
business to changing market conditions.
The very systems that were built to bring
automation and efficiency to the processes of the
organization now prevent the organization from
maintaining efficiency as business conditions
change.
The service-oriented approach to enterprise
software architecture replaces large, complex,
monolithic applications with applications composed
of loosely coupled collections of modular software
components linked through well-defined Web
service interfaces (Clabby, 2003). In other words,
SOA is an architectural style that promotes loosely
coupled interactions between software agents.
One of the best ways of enabling application
developers to understand concepts and put them to
use is by providing an application framework that
provides the infrastructure needed while designing
and developing applications based on those
concepts. Unfortunately, there is not enough
literature that can help application architects and
developers in the design and implementation phases
to build on the SOA concepts, apart from those from
product vendors, which mostly explain in terms of
their products/technologies.
In its simplest form, the basic SOA is
schematized in Figure 1.
It should be noted that there is no contradiction
between the fact that interacting software agents are
loosely coupled and the requirement for business
intelligence itself to be tightly coupled with business
processes. These issues simply do not have mutual
influence.
Service
Consumer
Service
Provider
Service Request
Service Response
The SOA Framework
Figure 1: The basic Service-oriented Architecture (Kay,
2004).
3.2 Benefits to Businesses Achieved
through SOA Implementation
For the business, the result of the Service-oriented
Architecture implementation is movement toward
what is often referred to as the ‘real-time enterprise.’
(Flint, 2003) Because applications have well defined
service-based integration points, and because these
services are built on standards embraced by every
major enterprise software vendor, connecting
software systems together will be orders of
magnitude easier than in the past.
The ability to move the right information, to the
right people and systems, at the right time,
maximizes the ability of the enterprise to identify
and interpret changes in its markets and to respond
by adjusting its processes, operating models or
structure.
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The business response to changing market
conditions often calls for modifying the information
systems that run the business. Frequently it requires
the creation or integration of entirely new
applications. For the IT organization tasked with
these activities, the result of SOA adoption is a
decrease in the cost and a dramatic increase in the
velocity with which these changes can be made.
Cost is reduced in the application development
cycle because existing application modules and
services can be leveraged as building blocks,
eliminating the costly and repetitive exertion of
effort that often slows today’s initiatives. In
addition, because application modules have well-
defined service interfaces that facilitate plugging and
unplugging, it is far easier to initially or eventually
outsource an application component or to purchase
and integrate packaged application logic.
Velocity improvements also follow from the
SOA approach. Because application development
becomes more like “application assembly” when
building on existing services, development time is
slashed (Thomas Mannes, 2003). Whereas
application complexity was high with monolithic
systems design, the modularity and relative
simplicity of application components in an SOA
makes them easier to understand and therefore to
enhance and change. And in addition to lowering
costs, the ability to outsource or purchase packaged
solutions, and then easily integrate them into the
application environment, also speeds change.
4 ADVANTAGES OF
SERVICE-ORIENTED
ARCHITECTURE FOR
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
SOLUTIONS DEVELOPERS
The core value of Web services is that it enables an
SOA-style application development paradigm which
offers the BI solution developer three key
advantages:
Web services are commonly built for
standardized interoperability and application
program interface (API) evolution – Web services
work on every operating system. Their design
objective is to deliver APIs that are very simple to
use and which evolve over time in such a way as not
to break existing applications (Lefevbre, 2001). This
holds the promise of less overall time spent in
application development, maintenance, support and
upgrade, allowing developers to spend more time on
new solutions instead of maintaining old ones.
Web services are built on ubiquitous Internet
protocols (i.e., loosely coupled, firewall-immune
APIs). Web services are specifically designed
around the challenges of remote system
functional access over the Internet. They can be
deployed using current staff skill sets (Kaye,
2003). Web services-based BI solutions can be
deployed across corporate firewalls. They can be
used where a BI resource is only occasionally
available, and they can be consumed everywhere, by
desktop client applications, server applications and
mobile devices.
The developer may become a BI service
provider. Converting BI application solutions into a
BI service provider allows the departmental staff to
customize their BI content, while insulating central
staff from the headaches normally associated with
such customizations. Long-term support and
maintenance costs decrease because technical
support is isolated to Web service calls and
invocation.
The concept of usage of business intelligence
solutions outside the firm’s walls as Web services is
shown in Figure 2.
Together these two features give Web services-
based solutions a new level of solution agility,
adaptability and reuse. This is a reason why Web
services technology intrigues and attracts as many
people as it does.
BI Service
Consumer
BI Web Services
Outside
Inside
Services
Figure 2: Usage of business intelligence solutions from
outside the enterprise.
5 CONCLUSIONS
Business intelligence has become a key component
of companies’ IT frameworks. It is a component that
enables business users to report on, analyze and
optimize business processes and operations to
reduce costs and increase revenues.
DELIVERING ACTIONABLE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE THROUGH SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE
193

As competitive pressures are forcing companies
to react faster to changing business conditions and
customer requirements, there is now a need to use
business intelligence to help drive and optimize
business processes and operations very quickly. This
type of BI is usually called operational business
intelligence.
The objective of operational BI is to make more
timely business decisions, and, therefore, if has a
close relationship to the subjects of real-time and
near real-time BI processing needed for the business
to be agile.
On the other side, the concept of Service-
oriented Architecture is becoming widely accepted.
They provide a new means of all kinds of
application interoperability including business
intelligence applications. Our opinion is that Web
services will help enterprises revolutionize BI by
enabling the conversion of specific BI application
deployments into flexible BI service providers that
can easily integrate into Web, server and desktop
solutions. This will shift the focus of BI solutions
from applications to complete networks which
provide targeted BI to everyone both inside and
outside the organization.
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Fersht, Ph. 2004. Web Services-Oriented Architectures
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http://www.yankeegroup.com/public/
Flint, D. 2003. New Technologies for the Real-Time
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http://www.gartner.com
Kay, R. 2002. QuickStudy: SOA. Computer World,
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Kaye, D. 2003. Loosely Coupled: The Missing Pieces of
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