Tuesday, July 23, 2013

What is Business Intelligence (BI) and it's benefits ?



BI stands for Business Intelligence, refers to set of techniques which helps in spotting, digging out and analyzing best information out of huge data to enhance business decision making.

Business intelligence (BI) is the set of techniques and tools for the acquisition and transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes.

BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, Online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics.

Business intelligence (BI) is a set of technologies, methodologies, processes, infrastructure and applications for gathering, storing, analyzing, and transforming large amounts of raw data into reasonable and useful information, helping enterprise users make better business decisions.

It helps enterprise users to make better business decisions. BI applications involve the activities of decision support systems, query and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining.

Business Intelligence (BI) is the process of transforming the business data into information/knowledge using computer based techniques thus enabling the users to take effective fact based decisions.

Business Intelligence (BI) technology infrastructure for gaining maximum information from available data for the purpose of improving business processes.

Business Intelligence (BI) Providing Right information at Right – Time in the Right- Format to the Decision makers.


            Typical BI infrastructure components are as follow: software solution for gathering, cleansing, integrating, analyzing and sharing data. Business Intelligence produces analysis and provides believable information to help making effective and high quality business decisions.


The difference between data and information

Data is row material for analysis. Data is always related to transactions or events. Once the data is analyzed it's considered to be meaningful information.




Categories of BI:
            Business Intelligence is generally divided into four different categories which are comprised of different types of BI that business working with data should be aware of.
1.    Reporting
2.    Analysis
a.    Spreadsheet Analysis
b.    Ad-hoc Query
c.     Visualization Tools
3.    Monitoring
a.    Dashboard
b.    KPI (Key Performance Indicator)
c.     Business Performance Management
4.    Prediction
a.    Data Mining
b.    Predictive Modeling

The Goal of BI is to allow for the easy interpretation of these large volumes of data. Identifying new opportunities and implementing an effective strategy based on insights can provide businesses with a competitive market advantage and long-term stability.


Benefits of BI: - Making your Business Intelligent will always help in every field whether saving time, increasing revenue, to do forecasting, making profit, etc. There are endless benefits of BI, some of them are listed below:-
  • Helps in providing more accurate historical data by eliminating guess work. As analysis is mainly done on huge volume of data. So, accurate historical data will make sure that we get the correct result. 
  • We can analyze customer’s behavior and taste (i.e. what he thinks, what he likes the most, what he hates, etc.) which can enhance your business and decision making power. 
  • We can easily look where our customer needs more attention and where we dominates the market in satisfying client’s needs. 
  • Complex Business queries are solved with a single click and at a faster rate which saves lots of time. 
  • Improve Data Security
  • Reduce resources and Labor Costs
  • Help to Develop and Deliver better Forecasting
  • It removes Guess work
  • Gives you quicker responses to your business-related queries.
  • Gain a better understanding of your business past, Present and future.
  • Identification of problem areas.
Improve efficiency using forecasting. You can analyze data to see where your business has been, where it is now and where it is going.

Success factors of implementation
Although there could be many factors that could affect the implementation process of a BI system. The following are the critical success factors for business intelligence implementation:
  • Business - driven methodology and project management.
  • Clear vision and planning.
  • Committed management support & sponsorship.
  • Data management and quality.
  • Mapping solutions to user requirements.
  • Performance considerations of the BI system.
  • Robust and expandable framework.

Advantages of Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence, when properly implemented and used, delivers many benefits. Some of the key advantages include:
  • Alignment of an organization around a consistent set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Metrics
  • Correct, Quicker, fact-based and Relevant decision making
  • Simplified graphical presentation of KPIs and metrics
  • Reliable presentation of information
  • Combination of multiple data sources (ERP, CRM, Spreadsheets, Budgets, etc.)
  • Faster collection and dissemination of information.
  • Easier and Quicker access to Information
  • Time Savings.

Disadvantages of Business Intelligence
Some of the major Business Intelligence disadvantages are:
  • Piling of Historical Data
  • Cost
  • Complexity
  • Muddling of commercial settings
  • Limited use
  • Time Consuming Implementation.
The most common kinds of Business Intelligence systems are: 

      EIS - Executive Information Systems
     DSSDecision Support Systems
     MISManagement Information Systems
     GISGeographic Information Systems
   OLAPOnline Analytical Processing and multidimensional analysis
    CRMCustomer Relationship Management


Steps involved in BI end to end Solution are:-

Integration of data from different data stores using ETL (Extract Transform Load), on which analysis is to be done.
Loaded data is then analyzed for BI engagement.

Representation of the analyzed result in the form of reports, scorecards, dashboards etc.



Business Intelligence:





There are various BI vendors offering end-to-end solutions in the market:



Other BI tools:


±SAP BusinessObjects: a complete BI platform

±IBM Cognos Series 10: strong in analytics

±JasperSoft: open source, now TIBCO

±MicroStrategy: strong in reporting & performance

±Oracle BI (OBIEE): a complete BI platform

±Oracle Hyperion System: tool for consolidation

±Pentaho BI: open source, now HDS

±Yellowfin BI: strong in dashboards

±Qlik: strong in Data Discovery

±SAP NetWeaver BW: data warehouse + cubes

±SAS BI: very strong in analytics

±Style Intelligence: a niche player

±Tableau Software: strong in Data Visualization

±WebFOCUS: a complete BI platform

±BizzScore: strong in performance management

±Board: strong in performance management

±Birst: a complete BI platform in the cloud