Business transactions as they occur are fed to a real-time BI system that maintains the current state of the enterprise.
The RTBI system not only supports the classic strategic functions of data warehousing for deriving information and knowledge from past enterprise activity, but it also provides real-time tactical support to drive enterprise actions that react immediately to events as they occur.
Some commentators have introduced the concept of right time business intelligence which proposes that information should be delivered just before it is required, and not necessarily in real-time.
Advanced implementations allow threshold detection, alerting and providing feedback to the process execution systems themselves, thereby 'closing the loop'.
Complex event processing tools can be used to analyze data streams in real time and either trigger automated actions or alert workers to patterns and trends.