 Business
Intelligence - What is it?
A major theme in 2002-2003 was the increasing use of Business Intelligence
(BI) for business process management (BPM). BI goes beyond static
data snapshots to enable users to identify and analyse ongoing business
trends and patterns. We'll now look back and see what BI is all
about.
Background
In the 1980's, finance and telecommunication companies pioneered
BI to support financial and market analysis of the large volumes
of data that they had begun to accumulate electronically. The need
for BI capabilities grew in the 80's and 90's in other industries
as companies began capturing data electronically across the full
range of their business activities. This need was further compounded
by the growing interest in real time data access which required
effective tools to mine and analyze dramatically increased data
volumes. To support this growing need, large software and services
providers like IBM and Oracle launched major initiatives to bring
data warehousing capabilities to the marketplace. These data warehouses,
or data marts, are the most common sources of data for BI applications.
ERP systems have also been used to capture data and enforce consistency,
but they tend to be too inflexible to support ad hoc exploration
of data. Fortunately, better tools for access and analysis have
emerged. These tools usually start with flexible query and reporting
capabilities that are combined with some mix of online analytical
processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting and data mining
techniques.
So
What's the difference between DataWarehousing (DW) & Business
Intelligence?
DW
- is a way of storing data and creating information through leveraging
data marts (DM). DM's are segments or categories of information
and/or data that are grouped together to provide 'information' into
that segment or category. DW does not require BI to work. Reporting
tools can generate reports from the DW.
BI
- is the leveraging of DataWarehousing to help make business decisions
and recommendations. Information and data rules engines are leveraged
here to help make these decisions along with statistical analysis
tools and data mining tools.
More
about Business Intelligence at http://businessintelligence.ittoolbox.com/
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