Business Intelligence is a term which refers to the collation, integration, interpretation and presentation of business data using technology and software applications.
The aim is to analyse and present information in a way that informs and influences business decisions.
Business Intelligence solutions are data driven, this data can be information from the past, present or predicting future occurrences.
Information is collected in a data warehouse and extracted using software applications, to shown in a format such as a report, in Microsoft Office or using web browsers.
Outline
- Typically a business’s online transaction processing (OLTP) systems have a normalised database structure optimised for updates. Providing access to this data is often difficult due to the complicated relational schemas of OLTP databases and often there are several data sources which need to be accessed together.
- The purpose of a BI solution is to provide a query optimised data warehouse which brings together all the multiple data sources in an organisation into a central location. A separate analysis processing database (OLAP) is built on top of this warehouse to provide historical, current and predictive views of the business data, allowing users to make informed decisions in response to changing conditions that impact the business.
Useful for businesses who:
- Require meaningful reports producing from complicated business data
- Require reports to execute quickly without impacting their online transactional systems, e.g. Sales, Financial or Production reports
- Need to combine multiple data sources into a single data warehouse
- Wish to expose business intelligence data to all levels of the organisation
- Would like to benchmark their company against others
How can it help?
- Integrate diverse data sources into a single centrally managed and trusted data warehouse
- Present useful data at all levels of your organisation
- Make more informed decisions, faster
- Pre-aggregate data for fast reports
- Drill down from high level aggregated data to detailed data
- Monitor performance and easily view trends in changing data
- Monitor regulatory compliance
- Present data in familiar tools such as web browsers and Microsoft Office
- Uncover hidden trends and predict future data using data mining algorithms
- Represent goals in easy-to-consume key performance indicators (KPI’s)
- Query and report on data without impacting operational system
- Improve performance of online systems by moving reporting to a separate system