Monitoring Strategic Business Goals with Argus

Abstract

Business analytics has emerged in the past decade as a top concern for business executives world-wide, surpassing earlier top concerns such as supply chain management and total quality management. Business analysis techniques analyze operational data for a variety of purposes including prediction, planning, monitoring, and trouble-shooting. In this paper we focus on one type of analysis, monitoring operational data to determine whether a business is on track relative to its strategic goals. If deviations exists, our approach narrows the search to the most problematic instances detected. Furthermore, we show how the process can be fully automated including the generation of all necessary queries. Finally, we show how the monitoring process has been implemented in our tool, Argus, which enables the analysis of arbitrary periods of time. Our prototype has been evaluated using a small data warehouse of synthetic data.