The purpose of operational Intelligence is to monitor business activities and identify and detect situations relating to inefficiencies, opportunities, and threats. Some definitions define Operational Intelligence an event-centric approach to delivering information that empowers people to make better decisions. OI helps quantify:

• The efficiency of the business activities
• How the IT infrastructure and unexpected events affect the business activities (resource bottlenecks, system failures, events external to the company, etc.)
• How the execution of the business activities contribute to revenue gains or losses.

This is achieved by observing the progress of the business activities and computing several metrics in real-time using these progress events and publishing the metrics to one or more channels (e.g., a dashboard that can display the metrics as charts and graphs, autonomic software that can receive these updates and fine-tune the processes in real-time, email, mobile, and messaging systems that can notify users, and so on). Thresholds can also be placed on these metrics to create notifications or new events.

In addition, these metrics act as the starting point for further analysis (drilling down into details, performing root cause analysis — tying anomalies to specific transactions and of the business activity).

Sophisticated OI systems also provide the ability to associate metadata with metrics, process steps, channels, etc. With this, it becomes easy to get related information, e.g., 'retrieve the contact information of the person that manages the application that executed the step in the business transaction that took 60% more time than the norm," or "view the acceptance/rejection trend for the customer who was denied approval in this transaction," "Launch the application that this process step interacted with.