How to Create Intelligent Enterprises

Enterprises need six basic building blocks for intelligent enterprise architecture: technology infrastructure, transaction processing infrastructure, integrating technology (data warehousing), decision process management, analytical applications, information and knowledge delivery services. The first building block is technology infrastructure, which enables the business to organize and access its information, regardless of its form. This infrastructure must be both flexible and scalable. The intelligent enterprise infrastructure should have capability to integrate the operational, informational and analytical processing of the enterprise and should support both structured data and unstructured data—documents, images, and video. The second component of intelligent enterprises should have transaction processing infrastructure, which supports the daily functions of the business. Systems like ERP, etc., should provide the systems and process support for executing the day-to-day functions of the business. The third component of intelligent enterprise is an integrating technology, that is, data warehousing. The data warehouse is the key link between transaction processing and strategic decision-making. In order to report on and analyze data that spans different corporate areas such as sales, logistics and manufacturing, an integrating technology (data warehousing) is required. This is your linchpin between transaction processing and strategic decision-making, ensuring that a common, integrated view of data is available for operational, analytical and informational decision-making processes. The fourth component is decision process management, which focuses on key operational functions that are enhanced with the benefits of data warehousing. By using your data warehouse to add trending, historical analysis and multidimensional viewing to traditional transaction processes, you can extend the functionality of diverse operational decision processes such as demand planning, database marketing, field service and sales force automation. Fifth is the analytical applications suite of the enterprise, which shapes key directional decisions that affect future business results. Analytical apps suites shape key directional decisions such as: Which customers will be most profitable in the middle market? What promotions will work and where? How do we best leverage our worldwide purchasing power? How will a planned acquisition in Latin America affect free cash flow and tax liability? Address the analytical decision processes squarely. The sixth component includes information and knowledge delivery services. Many significant measures used to track enterprise performance—market share, profitability, yield—are not simple metrics and need robust applications, which require that information delivery systems be linked to the other layers of the connected enterprise architecture (Savage, 1996).