Most so-called intelligent organisations extract data from production, feed it into business intelligence (BI) systems, analyse the findings and then - based on this analysis - modify the way they do things.
"The way forward, however, is for companies to follow a more integrated intelligence route," says Bruce Jones, manager of sales support at SAS Institute, the market leader in providing a new generation of business intelligence software and services that create true enterprise intelligence.
"In the future, intelligence processes will be far more automated with organisational behaviour responding immediately to new intelligence findings."
According to Jones, this automated response will be made possible by what's become known as "closed loop intelligence" - a term coined by the Butler Group, one of Europe's leading IT analyst companies.
Martin Butler, president of Butler Group, maintains that "closed loop intelligence" will soon become as much a part of IT 'speak' as concepts like Business Intelligence (BI) and systems integration.
Jones agrees, pointing out that SAS has been promoting the concept of closed loop architecture for some time, a fact acknowledged by Butler in the Butler Group's recent TECHwatch newsletter.
"SAS has solutions which enable organisations to work towards closing the loop on intelligence. There needs to be a feedback loop between the organisation and its intelligence - something that does not exist in most companies today," he says.
"Indeed, there is little in the way of anything like an automatic feedback into the actions the systems take from the intelligence it gathers. In fact we have two worlds in IT - the operational systems and BI."
In a closed loop environment, there is two-way feed between the operational environment and BI.
As Butler describes the process, "data is derived from production systems and intelligence is fed back to it in a closed loop. This involves the dynamic modification of business rules based on intelligence - possibly without human intervention for simpler operational tasks".
Jones says organisations are increasingly becoming aware of the need for an architecture which will make it possible to adapt to the speed at which businesses - and their systems - have to change to accommodate changes in the environments in which they operate.
"Eventually, change is going to occur too quickly for humans to deal with - some could say that is already occurring. This means that the systems themselves will have to be equipped to automatically adapt their own business rules to accommodate change.
"Another factor driving intelligent automation, and the closed loop systems which enable this, is the fact that closed loop systems will exhibit greater intelligence for many mundane tasks than people will ever want to."
However, Jones says, intelligent automation won't happen overnight.
"Nevertheless, the trend towards closed loop systems will accelerate over the next few years as the technology matures sufficiently to make intelligent automation a reality.
"Indeed, there is already real competitive advantage to be had from implementing entry-level closed loop architectures," he concludes.
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