What is Forward Looking Business Intelligence (FLBI)?
Most of IBM’s Cognos customers may not know this yet, but IBM has made a seismic shift in its BI licensing structure. IBM has consolidated many of its older BI roles into 5 roles. Quite a few of the converted roles will end up gaining new functionality in the new licensing landscape. One of the most important changes has to do with an introduction of a whole new role called the “FLBI role”, or Forward Looking Business Intelligence role. The FLBI role is a combination of Business Intelligence and Predictive Analytics. This role introduces a tool called SPSS Modeler for its Predictive Analytics capabilities.
Role of Predictive Analytics
With Predictive Analytics, Business Intelligence can enable smarter and more strategic decision making. With this type of capability, the end user can marry the historic and current views of the business to have views that can help determine what is likely to happen next. Predictive Analytics processes historical data, in that, it learns what has happened in the past and creates models that examine new sets of data against those models to obtain a prediction, or the likelihood of a future event or behavior occurring.
What is the FLBI role designed to do?
The FLBI role was designed by keeping in mind the need to understand the past and current state of your business, as well as future outcomes and their drivers. It gives you the tools to model your existing historical data to give you a guideline for future business behavior. By tying predictive measures against operation processes, FLBI can optimize your business outcomes. The role provides users of different levels of analytical skills to perform self-service data analysis. The role also leverages the flexibility of deployment options (be it desktops, browsers or mobile devices) and collaboration capabilities across departments and applications.
Going Forward
FLBI provides a very cost effective way to enter the world of Business Intelligence and Predictive Analytics. The introduction of this role, and the utilization of tools within the role, will provide your organization or LOB with insight into your data that will lead to better business outcomes.
Lodestar Solutions can be a valuable asset in providing you with knowledge and guidance required in order to understand and implement Forward Looking Business Intelligence capabilities.