Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) refers to practices that collect, analyze and render stored information into meaningful results. BI solutions provide historical, current, and predictive presentations of business operations often using data that has been gathered into a data warehouse1. Thus, reliable and efficiently designed data warehouses1 are the essential components of any BI solution.

Business Intelligence (BI) roots were once entrenched within legacy systems and were packaged within proprietary and cumbersome tools. The advent of client-server architecture in the late 1980s liberated business decision makers from these proprietary constraints. As a result, BI software has evolved into less-proprietary and friendlier solutions – Distributed Technology.

Coincidently, Distributed Technology has facilitated a diverse class of BI software tools. However, today’s evolving business processes continue to demand more sophisticated and less complicated BI solutions. There are various BI solutions to choose from, but there are few subject matter experts that specialize in various distributed technologies.

Basic Recommendations

  • Put database development in the hands of data & reporting experts.
  • Define each business organization’s requirements.
  • Optimize and leverage data querying solutions.
  • Define the data needs based on future business objectives.
  • Push the envelope of Distributed Technologies.

Typical BI Services

  • Data Warehousing
  • Data Mining (Reporting)
  • Data Analysis (ERM)
  • Data Administration (ETL)
  • Business Process Flow Modeling (TQM/Six Sigma)
  • Application Interaction Modeling (API)

BI solutions require subject matter experts (SME) to properly generate a more meaningful and beneficial business solution.

Footnotes

1. Data Warehouse: is a repository of an organization’s electronically stored data. Data warehouses are designed to facilitate reporting and analysis. The means to retrieve and analyze data, to extract, transform and load data (ETL), and to manage the data dictionary are also considered essential components of a data warehousing system.