Introduction to Business Intelligence

What is Business Intelligence?

"Knowledge if power!"
A vast amount of valuable data is stored in a company's databases spanning multiple applications. This data needs to be transformed into knowledge so that the company can take advantage of additional revenue opportunities. Business Intelligence, or BI, are the set of applications used to convert a company's massive amounts of data into knowledge which can then be used to improve operations and decision making capabilities of the company.

Business Intelligence - An Example

A customer leaves his email address with the clerk at checkout at a physical store. After a few days this customer receives an email from that store with some special offers. This customer clicks the store's link in his email and visits its online store. Here he sees details of the offer products and its related products. This customer makes a purchase online and picks up the goods from the physical store the next day.

In this scenario we see that it's necessary to connect the brick and mortar store with the online store. Clearly a Business Intelligence initiative requires integrated data from several different sources, thus making it important to have a data warehouse in place.

Some of the information sources that need to feed data to the data warehouse in order to support Business Intelligence capabilities are:
transaction systems, operational databases, ERP systems, call centers, web sites.

Components of a Business Intelligence Architecture

• Data Mining
  A Business Intelligence architecture must provide for data mining capabilities. Data mining involves discovering trends and patterns in large volumes of data so as to improve pricing, retain customers and find new revenue streams. Data Mining requires analytical tools which are an important component of Business Intelligence.
• Personalization
  Personalization helps a company to better understand and respond to a customer's requirements. Personalization can be made possible through Business Intelligence feedback.
• Performance Monitoring and Measurement
  Performanvce monitoring and measurement helps a company to improve its operations. Business Intelligence feedback helps in performance monitoring and measurement
• OLAP - Online Analytical Processing
  OLAP helps a company in decision making and reporting processes. OLAP provides a simpler method for analyzing complex data. OLAP allows non technical users to perform analysis. OLAP has advanced drill down and analysis capabilities.
• Data Warehousing
  In brief, a data warehouse is a repository of summarized, historical data extracted from various sources. It allows a company to gather all its data from various departments and store it in one place, in an integrated manner, to provide better business process visibility and thus improve performance.

How does a Data Warehouse work?

• Data from various sources comes in
• Data is extracted, transformed and cleaned
• Data is moved to the data warehouse
• Maintenance of meta data is performed
• Data is provided for analysis to various access tools such as spreadsheets, query engines, report writers, web browsers

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