Common Pitfalls So, what do organisations need to understand about real-time analytics before they invest in anything designed to help them speed decision-making?

Although there may be pressure to make everything real time, companies need to be selective and identify which business activities will benefit from real-time data feeds and which won't. Although real-time data feeds may cause problems like the one Adelaar described, they can help many kinds of workers, such as air traffic controllers, stock traders and emergency services providers, make better decisions faster.

Some experts say real-time analytics are most valuable at the point of customer contact so call centre personnel can use the data to make personalised offers, upsell or cross-sell. Bell Mobility, Canada's largest wireless carrier, operates two customer service centres staffed by 550 representatives. The company uses E.piphany's Real-Time tool to ensure that employees make the right offers at the right time without relying on guesswork, says Derek Pollitt, associate director of CRM strategy and deployment at Bell Mobility in Mississauga, Ontario.

Since the Real-Time tool was implemented last September, sales per hour have increased 18 per cent, and total inbound marketing revenue increased by 16 per cent in the first month. Bell Mobility has also been able to speed the time it takes to create new marketing campaigns by 75 per cent.

Tools and Troubles The real-time analytical tools now available are primarily from new, small suppliers such as Aleri or a few more-established providers such as Teradata, Sybase, InterSystems or E.piphany. These vendors offer tools meant to help companies in specific areas such as customer relations, rapid application development or the need for nonstop operations, says Alex Veystel, an analyst at Aberdeen Group (US).

Meanwhile, larger companies are having trouble finding off-the-shelf tools to extract pertinent information from various systems and transactional databases. So they have to create their own enterprise application integration middleware to extract the data and send it to analyst desktops, Goldenberg says.

For now, the cost to gain instant intelligence via real-time analytics is high. But in the future, analysts say, a faster return on investment for real-time analytics is possible - if companies can change processes and migrate to newer technologies such as XML, J2EE and Microsoft's .Net.

As hardware costs plummet, bandwidth expands and storage is increasingly commoditised, it will become far easier and less costly to access and analyse operational data in real time than in any current relational database environment, says Veystel.

Ultimately, analysts say, it's up to each business to seek insights delivered at the right moment to help speed crucial business decisions. Whether that information is updated once an hour, once a day, once a week or once a month will depend on each company's needs.