Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence

1. Information For Business Intelligence

   • Management needs information about
     • Customers
     • Suppliers
     • Competitors
     • Competitive environment
     • Global trends
     • Market trends
     • Internal operations

2. What is Business Intelligence?

   • Business intelligence (BI), is a term that refers to a variety of software applications used to analyze an organization’s data to improve decision making, cut costs, identify inefficient business processes and new business opportunities.
   • Business intelligence or a decision support system (DSS) is made up of several related activities, including data mining, online analytical processing, querying and reporting
   • The purpose of business intelligence is to support better business decisions based on facts and data rather than on intuition and anecdotes.
   • The implementation of business intelligence is challenging because of technical information flaws and resistance. Management must make sure that the data collected is accurate and consistent.

3. Benefits

   • Business intelligence can be used to identify improvement opportunities, analyze business data into accessible reports, react quickly to retail demand and optimize prices.
   • Business intelligence can give companies better position and leverage during negotiations by quantifying the value of relationships with suppliers and customers.
   • Business intelligence can save money by optimizing business processes and focusing on decisions.

4. KPI

   • Business intelligence often uses key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess the present state of business and to prescribe a course of action.
   • Companies that use BI to uncover defective business processes are in a much better position to successfully compete than companies that use BI merely to monitor what's happening.

5. Tools

   • Business Intelligence Dashboards
   • Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
   • Reporting software
   • Data mining-extraction

6. Data mining, Data warehouse, Data marts

   • Data mining: The process of sorting through large amounts of data to select relevant information for a specific purpose.
   • Data warehouse: A database designed to support decision making in an organization. Data from the business operation databases are copied to the data warehouse to enable queries to be performed without disturbing the performance or the stability of the operation systems.
   • Data marts: Data warehouses can become enormous with hundreds of gigabytes of transactions. As a result, subsets, known as "data marts," are often created to divide one department or product line.

7. Information System Management Must

   • Analyze how executives make decisions.
   • Consider what information executives need in order to facilitate quick, accurate decisions.
   • Pay attention to the quality of data.
   • Establish performance metrics that are most relevant to the business.
   • Provide the context that influences performance metrics.
   • Business Intelligence is more than just decision support. It has the potential to transform organizations.