3 reasons why business and data analysts need to work with real-time events

In a research brief defining “5 trends for 2023,” the IBM Institute for Business Value reports, “In 2023, rapid response is the new baseline. Uncertainty is expected and complexity is compounding. As threats materialize on multiple fronts, organizations must reduce the time from insight to action.”¹

Business and data analysts are intimately familiar with the growing business need for precise, real-time intelligence. They are being increasingly challenged to improve efficiency and cost savings, embrace automation, and engage in data-driven decision making that helps their organization stand out from the competition. To meet these objectives, business and data professionals need to go beyond cookie-cutter business intelligence, data visualization dashboards and data analytics tools. They need to uncover the right digital signals and constantly be aware, so they can detect and respond to critical business scenarios in real-time.

This is where event-driven solutions excel. Working with “business events” is essential for unlocking real-time insights that enable intelligent decision making and automated responses.

A business event can describe anything that happens which is significant to an enterprise’s operation. A business event is represented by a change in state of the data flowing between your applications, systems and databases and, most importantly, the time it occurred.

• Receiving a new product order
• A decrease in the stock level of a best-selling item
• A new customer support ticket
• A surge in demand levels
• Customer behavior in an e-commerce platform, e.g., placing an item in the checkout cart
• A drop in the pricing of raw materials in your supply chain
• A customer’s social media post about your company

By working directly with streams of business events, users can define critical scenarios, detect them in real-time and respond intelligently. For example, events that describe changes in demand can help make better business decisions on inventory optimization. Events that represent customer satisfaction can drive more proactive responses, quickly turning negative customer experiences into positive ones. Or events identifying repeated component failures in a production line can enable predictive maintenance and earlier resolution of issues to help minimize the costs of rework and downtime.

These advantages are only possible if companies can quickly capture and connect the dots between events in time to impact outcomes and influence KPIs, proactively responding to new opportunities or emerging threats.

1. They deliver accurate, real-time data you can depend on.

Businesses can’t afford to rely solely on historical data. Streams of business events provide users with a persistent, continuously updated record of their data, as it is being generated. Instead of waiting for data sets to accumulate over time or processing large amounts of data in batches, events provide the ability to perform data analysis in motion. This ensures that key events can be detected and acted upon before their usefulness expires.

IBM worked with Norsk Tipping to build a modern event-driven architecture that accelerated their data processing and delivered more responsive user services. By processing data in motion with IBM Event Automation, Norsk Tipping was able to analyze thousands of transactions from up to a million users at a rate 6x faster than before.

2. They are highly configurable, allowing you to define and detect scenarios unique to your business operations.

By processing multiple streams of events from different data sources, users can define and detect both simple and complex business scenarios. Joining, aggregating, filtering and transforming streams of events allows users to effectively paint a picture—describing patterns of events that make up a time-sensitive threat or opportunity. IBM has created an intuitive, low code tool designed to empower less technical stakeholders to work with business events and make better decisions, without having to write code or be an expert in SQL. This helps businesses quickly expand into new use cases and derive actionable insights that maximize revenue potential.

3. They go beyond insights, providing key triggers to drive intelligent automation.

Once users define a critical business situation, they can generate a new stream of events that reports anytime a particular scenario is detected. While this intelligence is already helpful to streamline operations and fuel smarter decisions, organizations can go a step further by activating automation. This could be to trigger process workflows, take decisions based on business rules or prompt digital workers to get more time back for things that matter. Event-driven solutions allow businesses to build more intelligent automations that respond to new trends, customer issues or competitive threats in the moments that matter most.

IBM provides a comprehensive suite of automation capabilities that help you benefit and act on event-driven intelligence. With products such as IBM Business Automation Workflow, IBM Operational Decision Manager and IBM watsonx Orchestrate, there are a wealth of possibilities on your journey to becoming an autonomous and event-driven enterprise.

Request a custom demo to see how IBM Event Automation can help enable you, and your team put business events to work, powering real-time data analytics and activating automation. You can also view the webcast, “Responding in Real-Time to Changing Market Dynamics,” or explore the IBM Event Automation website to learn more.