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Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence (BI) refers to technologies and methods for the collection, integration,
analysis, and presentation of business information. BI describes
a set of concepts and practices to improve business decision making
by using knowledge-based support systems.
The aim of BI is to support better decision making to achieve corporate
objectives. Therefore it must accommodate the different needs
of people in an organization and incorporate all the types
of information, both structured and unstructured, people use to make
decisions.
A typical Business Intelligence
system comprises three well inter-connected technologies/practices:
Data warehousing, reporting and analysis, and performance management.
Data warehousing: For most of the organizations, the business data
probably resides in multiple systems and lacks consistency. This makes it difficult for people to access the data for
meaningful analysis.
For example, in practice
valuable information are obtained and archived
in many unstructured ways such as RSS feeds, online data transfer, and data in
emails. Data warehousing can help in these situations to provide
insight into corporate data through an integrated,
centrally managed, and trusted data source.
Datawarehousing is useful when the application is about producing reports and queries on servers not used for the
transaction processing. One should aim to use data models and server technologies to speed up reporting and querying.
These data models and server technologies are not necessarily appropriate for transaction processing.
An ideal
datawarehousing system provides an environment where a relatively small amount of knowledge of
the technical aspects of database technology is required to write and maintain queries and reports and/or to provide
a means to speed up the writing and maintaining of queries and reports by technical personnel.
Reporting and Analysis: Software elements of BI support interactive analyses,
visualization, statistical data mining, and reporting
for the effective decision making.
Companies strive to standardize on a single reporting and analysis platform to deliver analytic, business,
and enterprise reporting, but very few are able to succeed. No one single reporting and analysis platform that
can deliver all required functions. Companies should consider adopting a standard that
can support at least two of the three different reporting types and fill in gaps with the alternative
XML and Web services capabilities, advanced visualization, and process definition whenever possible.
Business Statistics plays an important role in the
Data Analysis part of the "Reporting and Analysis" for decision making.
For example, statistical tools such as a special form of linear regression,
known as exploratory analysis, is a widely used tool in
building and explaining relationships between several business variables.
Performance Management: Performance is improved by
aligning corporate strategies with infrastructure,
people and processes. A typical BI system is expected to provide applications
that process production, distribution, sales, and
financial information to achieve an improved
corporate performance.
In this section
we will deal primarily with the
statistical techniques used in Business Intelligence. We will not cover
Information Technology and project management issues here.
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