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Business Intelligence
(BI) includes software applications, technologies and
analytical methodologies that perform data analysis.
BI (also known as Decision Support Systems) includes
data mining, web mining, text mining, reporting and
querying, OLAP, and data visualization.
This article explores
BI's role in an era of an unprecedented amount of data.
It explains the value a BI solution offers to everyone
competing in global electronic economy. It begins with
an explanation of BI and the data dilemma overcome by
BI’s four key enabling technologies: data warehouses/marts;
extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) tools;
on-line analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining.
What makes
up a BI solution/application?
We look at a
BI technology solution as encompassing everything from
where you source the information (enterprise resource
planning, customer relationship management, legacy applications,
or the Internet); through extracting, transforming,
and cleansing that information; to populating it into
a data warehouse, which could include things like an
operational data store or a data mart; to ultimately
delivering the information to individuals throughout
the enterprise through a variety of delivery mechanisms.
Those mechanisms can include things like traditional
OLAP or analytical tools, data mining tools, and portals.How
would you use a portal to deliver information?
Why should
a company be interested in implementing BI?
What's the business value ... the value is tremendous.
Looking at it from a top-line perspective around customers,
companies have really deployed BI applications to identify
and attract new customers, cross- and up-sell to their
existing customer base in a much more personalized way,
using BI to retain customers, etc.
Over the last
year or two, as priorities have changed, companies have
used BI applications to take a look at where they could
operate more efficiently and drive costs out of the
business. Now, we're finding that companies are focused
on bottom-line results like product and customer profitability.
The whole notion of what we call integrated performance
management or balanced scorecard, which takes a look
across the entire enterprise. We're seeing BI applications
embedded into every function within an enterprise.
The relationship
between business intelligence and data mining and data
warehousing
The backbone for business
intelligence includes a data warehouse, where you're
collecting all of the information to power a BI system.
Data mining is
the technology that is being embedded within BI applications
that provide the predictive modeling and forecasting
abilities.
Companies
who employ Business Intelligence
Right now we're seeing it across the entire enterprise,
some examples:-
- Executives
use it through executive dashboards and balanced scorecard
applications
- Sales and marketing
uses it to get a lot more sophisticated around customer
behavior, customer service,
target marketing, etc.
- Finance use
it extensively as CFOs and controllers are stepping
beyond their traditional role and looking for ways
to provide more value to business, which means looking
at things like customer profitability and workforce
analytics.
- HR use it to
bring together employee information around recruiting,
training, deployment, and leadership succession planning.
- We see a lot
of demand in the supply chain on top of ERP for demand
planning and forecasting-also inventory management
and procurement.
We're seeing BI
applications being deployed in every major function
of enterprises.
Data is only 15%
of the typical organization's information, what about
the bulk of the unstructured information. Content management
and things like portals are now standard part of these
integrated architectures. Advances are being made in
the tools and technologies to allow companies to do
a more effective job of organizing and storing those
documents and other unstructured information. They are
being embedded in the applications today and will continue
to be a prominent part of these solutions.
Business intelligence
is becoming a lot more attractive to small and middle
market companies. Ultimately, you're going to see more
companies look to organizations like Computer eCommerce
to outsource these applications. |
