Touro University International
ITM501 - Management Information Systems and Business Strategy
Module 2 Case Assignment: Business Intelligence Systems
04 June 2010
Business intelligence: Definition Business Intelligence (BI) is defined by IBM as, “the discipline that combines services, applications and technologies to gather, manage and analyze data, transforming it into usable information to develop insight and understanding needed to make informed decisions.” (IBM.com, 2006) In its most basic form, BI is an umbrella principle that synergizes the core understanding of your business, including all of its facets, and acting on what that foundation is made up of. The quality of your BI traditionally depended on the experience
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IBM’s solution offers a reasonable starting point for low cost startup and growth planning. Data Base 2 (DB2) Warehouse is IBM’s BI software. The BI software focuses on data warehousing, consolidating data from unrelated sources and forms a “single version of the truth” (IBM.com, 2007), available to users through a variety of analyses. DB2 Warehouse is built to manage mixed workload, run queries concurrently, and also pre-aggregate related data for improved query performance. DB2 Warehouse capabilities include modeling, data mining and visualization, and embedded analytics and database management tools. DB2 has an integrated compression that has proven a savings of 45-69% disk space, and a workload control that automatically prioritizes and schedules queries. In addition to basic data warehousing and mining, IBM has prepackaged solutions for specific industries: banking, retail, insurance, healthcare, telecommunications and law enforcement. DB2 Warehouse will serve clients running Microsoft® Windows® XP or 2000, and run on servers with any of the following operating systems: IBM AIX® 5L™, Red Hat Enterprise Linux® 3 and 4, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9, Sun Solaris 9, Microsoft® Windows® Server 2003. It is compatible with two web browsers: Microsoft® Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Microsoft® offers BI built around the already widely used Microsoft Office® suite. The primary BI component is Excel
Business intelligence (BI) merges architectures, tools, databases, analytical tools, applications, and methodologies. It also is context free like DSS. BI deduces the connections between business entities by evaluating copious volumes of historical data which supports decisions. BI has four major components consisting of a data warehouse, business analytics, business performance management, and a user interface.
Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_intelligence, defines business intelligence as “computer based techniques used in spotting, digging out and analyzing business data.” SQL Server’s Business Intelligence tools include the Reporting Services, Analysis Services, and Integration Services among others. A complete overview can be found at
2. Business intelligence: Delivers synchronized, business-critical data in a variety of diagnostic tools to view market trends and build relationships that help facilitate timely decision making (Microsoft Dynamics NAV, 2011).
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.
In detail, a strong resistance will come from some of the operating companies that already have “their own small-scale business intelligence applications in place”. These companies may not see any valid reason or advantage to switch and implement a new software system. Furthermore, another obstacle that SYSCO might confront will be the objection from the existing managers and IT experts averse and incapable of using a new software with different functions. Moreover, the forthcoming implementation time of the BI software proposed by the Assistant Vice President of Technology and Applications Twila Day might raise doubts and concerns among management as well as
The value of Business Intelligence increases as the delivery of information is embedded in the processes and systems of the enterprise which results from all data being store for end users. The BI software seems to be very efficient in its
The main objective of this project was to meet the needs of data management, capturing data from various data sources and integrating the data into a database for reporting purposes. This was achieved previously using a legacy system called as FOCUS and is now replaced by a database using SQL Server Business Intelligence. SQL Service Business Intelligence is not only used to load data into the database but also provides tools for reporting and analysis services. Loading data is done using a tool provided by SQL Server called
As we discuss the possibility of emerging into business intelligence software we must keep in mind the overall purpose of using any type of software is to reach strategic goals in order to increase market shares. I will discuss how business intelligence software will allow us to meet those strategic goals. We will establish what type of information and analysis capabilities will be available once this business intelligence software is implemented. We will discuss hardware and system software that will be required to run specific business intelligence software. Lastly, I will give a brief synopsis on three vendors (IBM, Microsoft Microsoft and Oracle) that are dominating the business information software
Business Intelligence (BI) tools are extensively adopted by many companies to operate as efficiently as possible. The report investigates a BI adoption in a retail chain. . The analyzed data and reported actionable information help the stakeholders take right decisions in their business. Finally, the presented research identifies innumerous benefits including decision-making to be the most vital by the retail chain managers.
BI applications include the activities of decision support systems, query and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting and data mining. ("Business Intelligence (BI)." What Is ? N.p., n.d. Web. 27 July 2013).
Walmart is the biggest retailer in the world and handles more than one million customer transactions every hour and generates more than 2.5 petabytes of data storage (Venkatraman & Brooks, 2012). To put this into perspective, this data is equivalent to 167 times the number of books in America’s Library of Congress (Venkatraman & Brooks, 2012). So how can Wal-Mart use this massive amount of data and what useful information can this data provide? This paper will provide a brief overview of the importance of Business Intelligence (BI) and how the largest retailer in world, Walmart, is using it.
R.L Fielding (2008) reiterates that Business Intelligence is a thorough and holistic analysis of the company records, data, information, and software application for effective decision making. All decision making processes need an organized, readily-accessible, and human readable compilations of data. With the use of an effective tool the firm can easily figure out their own business processes, the behavior of their customers, and the economic trend of the industry. With these facts, the firm can arrive at a better strategy to achieve their specified goals with confidence.
Furthermore, the Gartner website argues that “BI has become a strategic initiative and is now recognised by chief information officers (CIOs) and business leaders as instrumental in driving business effectiveness and innovation,” (Anon., 2007). Gartner also argues that “BI projects were the number one technology priority for 2007” (Anon., 2007). According to the Bill Inmon, data warehouse is “a subject-oriented, integrated, time variant and non-volatile collection of data used in strategic decision making”. Hammergen & Simon, (2009) define data warehouse more simpler by saying that “ Data warehousing is therefore the process of creating an architected information management solution to enable analytical and information processing despite platform, application, organizational, and other barriers.“ It is important to note that data warehouse system is different from relational database. The reasons of that are: (1) In the data warehouse data is stored for long term; (2) DW is designed for high performance for analytical queries; (3) its OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) technology enables to view data in various form; (4) linking between tables are simple (Tushman, 2014). Databases, in contrast, have a low performance regarding data analysis; joins between tables are
Design, code and deliver user friendly multi-tier business intelligence solutions that utilize data warehouse/data mining technologies to consume data across various database platforms and data stores.
Business intelligence (BI) is presently broadly utilised, especially in the world of practice, to describe analytic applications. BI is a process that includes two primary activities: getting data in and getting data out. Getting data in, traditionally referred to as data warehousing, includes moving information from a set of source frameworks into a coordinated data warehouse. Getting data in delivers limited value to an enterprise; only when users and