Issue 4 Summer 008
The right time for right decisions
Brigid Whoriskey interviews Dr Stephen Brobst, Chief Technology Officer with Teradata.
Stephen Brobst is Chief Technology Officer with Teradata – he’s a
practitioner, an academic, an author and a renowned expert on business
intelligence and data warehousing. Brigid Whoriskey met him earlier this year
to discuss trends in decisioning services, the transformational potential of
managing data, and just how important real-time information actually is.
BW» What do you mean by “Decisioning services not required for most decisions within an organisation.
for the real-time enterprise?” Right time is the term I prefer. It’s about delivering the right
data to the right person at the right time.
SB» There are two important parts of this phrase to
consider. Firstly, decisioning services for the enterprise Right-time is defined by your business processes, not by
refers to the delivery of capability for decisions, not technology. Right-time might be within an hour, within a
just to the traditional users of management information minute or within a day, depending on what you’re doing.
systems in the corporate ivory tower, but throughout
the organisation. Business information is becoming
TERADATA
pervasive – getting the right information to the right
Teradata is a leading provider of analytic solutions
decision makers at the right time.
for delivering business intelligence to Global 3000
enterprises and focus on capturing the data,
Secondly, the real-time aspect is about making the
delivering the data to decision makers in the form
information actionable. Historically management
of information that’s useable and actionable.
information systems delivered reports. Reports in my
mind are very passive – we can see what happened
yesterday but not what are we going to do about it BW» Traditionally we’ve talked about operational
today. Real-time decisioning is about getting the relevant systems and MI as being quite distinct. Are the
information to an individual who can make a decision boundaries now blurring?
that affects the here and now.
SB» They are blurring. As organisations get more
BW» How important is the real-time aspect? sophisticated in the use of analytics and decision
SB» Actually, real-time is really the wrong term. I think of making services, the decisioning services often become
real-time as measured in nanoseconds and that’s clearly operational. In the past, if a system went down for the day
1 | Perspectives on technology
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