Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence is the gathering and analysis of large amounts of information so as to gain insights that propagate strategic and tactical business decisions. Business Intelligence is the mix of the processes and technologies which change data into information. It includes a wide category of technologies, including data warehousing, multidimensional analysis or online analytical processing, data mining and visualization, as well as basic queries and multiple types of analytical tools for reporting. These technologies allow business stakeholders to collect, store, access, and do the analysis of data to improve the business decision-making capabilities.
Business intelligence goes in hand with other organization application areas like data mining and data warehousing.
Data warehousing
Data warehousing is defined as the design and operation of processes and tools to manage and deliver complete, timely, accurate, and understandable data for decision making. It includes all the activities that make it possible for an organization to create, manage, and maintain a data warehouse or data mart. Data warehousing majorly deals with managing the development, the implementation, and the operation of a data warehouse or data store. It includes data management, data acquisition, data archiving, data cleansing, storage management, data integration, data distribution, security management operational reporting, analytical reporting, backup and recovery planning,
Business Intelligence: Business intelligence is a program that coordinates the best combinations of data in sales to achieve maximum profits.
Business Intelligence (BI) is the consolidation and analysis of internal data and / or external data for the purpose of effective decision-making. At the core of all BI initiatives is a data warehouse to hold the data and analytics software. The data warehouse stores data from operational systems in the organization and restructures it to enable queries and models to extract decision support reports.
Business Intelligence refers to the variety of systems used by a company to analyze their raw data. The data is stored in data warehouses, in which
According to Sauter (2010), business intelligence is defined as a goal, information is provided to decision makers in a timely manner to solve organizational problems or to act on opportunities for the organization. The business intelligence system aids decision makers in better understanding problems through data. Business intelligence has become necessary due to globalization and the rate of speed in which business is conducted today, 24/7. Information alone, is not business intelligent. The information must be “intelligent” (p. 56). Intelligent information is information that is important to the organization and aligns with the organization 's goal (Sauter, 2010).
Business intelligence is the ability of a business to be able to extract actionable insight from business as well as market data, which is used to make better decisions in business; and to improve the corporate performance of the business. Business intelligence must exist for businesses in the world today to survive(Electrosmard Ltd). Almost every business today worth its salt is looking for the appropriate business intelligence technology in order to survive in today’s fiercely competitive world. Business intelligence also helps companies and businesses to survive during hard economic times. During such periods, it is not a surprise to find companies still spending on the processes of business intelligence because without such solutions, there is no business at all. In any case, there is a business; it is most likely on the decline in terms of productivity and revenues. Business intelligence is not a onetime thing; it is an ongoing process. Business intelligence goes on as long as the business is still running; the business intelligence continues to exist too.
Traditionally, business intelligence (BI) has been used as an umbrella term to describe the concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based decision support systems. BI also includes the underlying architectures, tools, databases, applications, and methodologies. BI’s major objectives are to enable interactive and easy access to diverse data, enable manipulation and transformation of these data, and provide business managers and analysts the ability to conduct appropriate analyses and perform the actions [Turban et al. 2008; Wixom et al. 2011]. Successful BI initiatives have been reported for major industries, from healthcare and airlines, to major IT and telecommunication firms [Anderson-Lehman et al. 2004; Carte et al. 2005; Turban et al. 2008].
Legacy Business Intelligence tools, which more than 70% of companies today use, are becoming obsolete as they do not align with the needs of businesses today. These cumbersome and highly centralized systems cannot support increasingly dispersed teams that need access to information to take key strategic decisions that help run the business. As a result, an increasing number of corporate decision makers are turning to a next generation, easy to use real time cloud based analytical tools to achieve their business objectives.
Business intelligence is a vital part of keeping an organization competitive. Data mining processes are essential to developing business intelligence. According to a study by IBM, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day. This total includes everything from photos and social media posts to word processing files, financial records and Snap chats. The objective of data mining is to use the enormous amount of information being produced to understand trends, accumulate additional new information, and develop better processes and services based on research, behavior, and preferences
• Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (BI Apps) are prebuilt BI solutions that deliver intuitive, role-based intelligence for everyone in an organisation that enable better decisions, actions, and business processes. Based on best practices, these solutions enable organisations to gain greater insight and value from a range of data sources and applications including Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and third party systems such as SAP.
SAP BusinessObjects is a front-end business intelligence software that allows user to Design, Report and Analyze data that help in decision
Data warehousing is an efficient system which store the past as well as current data used for creating reports. Data warehousing system is used for decision making by analyzing the reports. A data warehouse is a relational database, which is designed for analysis and query. It helps an organization to consolidate and analyze data from different sources and make decision. A data warehouse environment consists of OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) engine, ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Loading) process, client analysis tools and other applications that manage gathering and delivering the data.
Data warehousing is a single repository or storage of data integrated from different sources which allows the business and the organization to generate a report or analysis to make decisions based on those data. Data warehousing is an integral part of any organization as it helps to increase the efficiency of the decision makers by integrating and transforming the data from multiple incompatible sources to the consistent and meaningful information which allows them to perform accurate, consistent and substantive analysis of data(P. 1152).
Business Analytics refers to the skills, advancements practices for continuous iterative investigation and examination of past business execution to pick up knowledge and drive business planning. Business analytics concentrates on growing new bits of knowledge and comprehension of business execution taking into account data and statistical methods. Conversely, business intelligence generally concentrates on utilizing a predictable arrangement of measurements to both measure past execution and guide business planning, which is also based on data and statistical methods
These are original texts and were written and revised on 10 February 2012 by Gartner Inc. The original document is part of Gartner 's Magic Quadrant research methodology to provide a graphical and analytical competitive positioning of Business Intelligence technology providers.
Business Intelligence helps organizations to make better, faster decisions about their customers, partners, and operations by turning mountains of data into valuable business information. It helps to bring together information, people, and technology to create successful business strategies and helps to execute those strategies with confidence.