Friday, November 25, 2011

Understanding the Elements of Business Intelligence

By Terra Fox


There are numerous definitions of business intelligence and some of it are extremely complicated. BI is best classified as a computer-based strategy used to identify, extract, and analyze business data. A wider meaning of this system application refers to the skills, processes, technologies, applications, and practices used to influence the internal and external information of a company or a business. The information here becomes an asset of the company or business to aid and boost their executive power. Anything has a goal on why it was developed. For BI, the purpose of it is to enable fact-based decision-making on the part of the owner to assist their mission and goals. Simply put, BI was created to help business succeed.

Each component located in various things has its own functionality. In business intelligence, the 12 primary elements have their own and distinct job to make BI effective. These elements are basic and important part of business intelligence as well as other things. With out it, things would be deemed useless. From the 12 primary elements, only seven would be discussed which consists of analytics, customer relationship management (CRM), dashboards, data warehouse, data integration, data mining, and on-line analytical processing (OLAP). The functions of each element in addition to various other things would be discussed under.

Application of computer technology, operational research, and statistics to solve problems in business and industry is one definition of analytics. Another meaning of it speaks about the study of data using statistical analysis in order to discover and understand historical patterns. There is a need for analytics so that business owners can predict and improve their business in the future. There are two uses of customer relationship management. The first one is it organizes, automates, and synchronizes business processes used for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The second use is handling the interactions of the company to its customers, clients, and sales prospects. Visual presentation of performance measures, ability to identify and correct negative trends, and ability to generate detailed reports showing new trends are some of the benefits of using dashboards. To sum it all up, the benefit of having a dashboard is it makes reading of company information system very easy.

Another element of business intelligence is data warehouse. This was created to facilitate reporting and analysis across the business. Functioning associated with data warehouse is in 3 levels: staging, used to store raw data for developers; integration, used to integrate data and have a level of abstraction from users; and access, employed for obtaining data out for consumers. Data integration includes merging information located in various places and giving users with a one view of these data. Data mining is a form of database analysis used in obtaining helpful behaviour or interactions in a group of information. It employs state-of-the-art statistical methods like cluster analysis. It also employs artificial intelligence or artificial intelligence. On-line analytical processing is BI element that provides end users with access to large amounts of data in a natural and rapid manner. It helps in deductions which are based in investigative reasoning. OLAP systems assist the complex analysis requirements of decision-makers and the analyzing of data from a number of various perspectives.

Despite having distinct functions from each other, these business intelligence elements are important in its effectiveness. These elements are very important not just for the BI system but also to other things.




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