Having more, and more current, information is fast becoming a requirement for business survival. The need permeates the enterprise because it enables proactive decision-making for problem avoidance, rather than reactive problem impact minimization. And that is the key. Thus the need for, and focus on, is real-time.

Companies no longer have the long strategic time-frames in which to plan, design, and manage their business processes. Yearly revenue goals and measurements are fast becoming quarterly goals and measurements. Investors and share-holders are more demanding. They are more critical, and less forgiving, of missed performance goals. And these demands are coming at a time when the volume of data is growing, there is an increase in business mergers and acquisitions, the use of strategic outsourcing is growing, and there is an increasing requirement for faster and faster turnaround on information requests. This has put an enormous burden on the information technology (IT) organizations. And most of this change is centered around business intelligence, because that is the environment responsible for providing information for management decision-making.

This IBM Redbooks publication explores the techniques and capabilities for evolving to a real-time enterprise. It also demonstrates approaches for that evolution and provides examples to help guide you in developing your strategy and implementation methodology to become a real-time enterprise.

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. The real-time enterprise

Chapter 3. Architectural considerations

Chapter 4. IBM technologies supporting real-time

Chapter 5. More real-time enterprise enablers

Chapter 6. The project test environment

Chapter 7. The case study