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Business Intelligence
Business intelligence is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, providing access to, and analyzing data for the purpose of helping enterprise users make better business decisions. The term implies having a comprehensive knowledge of all of the factors that affect your business. It is imperative that you have an in depth knowledge about factors such as your customers, competitors, business partners, economic environment, and internal operations to make effective and good quality business decisions. Business intelligence enables you to make these kinds of decisions.
Internal Operations are the day to day activities that go on in your business. You need an in depth knowledge about the internal workings of your business from top to bottom. If you make an arbitrary decision without knowing how your entire organization works it could have negative affects on your business. BI gives you information on how your entire organization works.
Business intelligence spreadsheets have been around since the late 1970s. They were an instant sensation. Over the years, spreadsheets have evolved and matured, but the basic form and substance of spreadsheets has hardly changed. While new features and capabilities continue to be added to spreadsheets, for the most part spreadsheet technology has reached a plateau. This is typical of a highly successful product. However, it is becoming clear that new approaches and paradigms should and are beginning to emerge.
For the second year in a row, SAS was acknowledged as the leader in business intelligence and analytics applications sales in Latin America. SAS was reported with a 15.25 percent market share in the “Latin America Semiannual Business Intelligence and Analytic Applications Tracker (2005 data)” report (Doc # LA1677, Jun 2006).
“IDC’s business analytics report further illustrates the advantage that SAS provides to customers today,” said Jim Davis, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for SAS. “We supply a wide range of solutions for lines of business as well as specific vertical industries on the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform. These solutions work together to integrate individual technology components within an existing IT infrastructure into a single, unified system that transcends organizational silos, diverse computing platforms and niche tools.”
Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) is the most comprehensive portfolio of technology and applications for enabling the insight-driven organization, including leading BI applications, BI platform technology, and data warehousing. With the #1 market share in business analytics, Oracle BI enables organizations to gain complete and timely insight, distribute intelligence pervasively, and drive more effective actions and processes. Oracle BI is hot-pluggable with Oracle and non-Oracle environments so customers can fully leverage existing data sources, systems and applications. At the same time, by offering comprehensive, integrated solutions that are optimized and pre-integrated with Oracle database, middleware, and applications, organizations can benefit from reduced cost and complexity and a unified BI infrastructure.
Business intelligence (BI) technology allows organizations to track, understand, and manage vital business information. BI is assuming an increasingly strategic role as more organizations look for ways to tap into the valuable data stored in their operational systems. A typical BI project has an average return on investment (ROI) of over 430%1, but due to the fragmented implementation of these projects, organizations are unable to fully benefit from global, cross-functional information analysis.
BI standardization ensures strong ROI by reducing BI tool purchase, implementation, and training costs. These benefits are detailed in a companion white paper entitled “Reduced Costs Through Business Intelligence Standardization.”2
This white paper focuses on an important aspect of BI standardization: the criteria you should use to choose your BI standard. Each organization’s needs are different, but the criteria for a BI standard can typically be grouped into three main areas of requirements:
- Functional capabilities. The ability of a product to address the identified BI user needs.
- Infrastructure requirements. The extent to which the product meets the infrastructure needs of the organization in terms of fit with existing architecture, scalability, and extensibility.
- Vendor criteria. The ability of the chosen vendor to support your current and future projects in terms of stability, resources, and experience.
The following sections cover each of these areas in more detail, and explain why Business Intelligence is the best choice as your BI standard
In this example, five products with overlapping functionality can be consolidated into three separate standards: one for data warehousing; one for BI uses ranging from operational reporting through to dashboards; and another for more sophisticated data mining.
The BI industry is a complex one, and industry experts differ on how exactly to draw the lines between different types of BI functionality, but there is a broad consensus about the following BI software categories:
A set of unambiguous criteria should be used to reduce BI functional overlap.
Database management and data warehousing software. These products provide the functionality to store information efficiently for end-user access. Although they are sometimes viewed as separate from the rest of the BI product choice, they are clearly a foundation of the overall BI system.
Choosing a Business Intelligence Standard
Data integration software. These products are also known as extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) software. They are designed to combine information from multiple sources to feed a database or data warehouse.
Operational or embedded reporting software. These products provide the reports for the systems used to run the organization on a daily basis. They are often seamlessly embedded into applications. Examples of operational reports include bills of lading, invoices, and payroll slips.
Enterprise reporting software. These products distribute reports efficiently to large groups of users inside or outside the organization. They include additional security, management, and distribution features that are lacking in simple operational reporting.
Querying and analysis. These products are designed to give business users and analysts autonomous and interactive information access. Users are not limited to the subset of information available in a particular report or cube, but can ask new questions and analyze any of the information stored in the database or data warehouse.
Analytic applications. These products are designed for information analysis in a particular area, such as human resources or finance.
Dashboards and scorecards. These products gather key corporate performance indicators and display them in a single interface. Typically associated with executive users, they may also support goal setting, collaboration, and standard business methodologies like Balanced Scorecard.
Data mining. These products are used for sophisticated, automatic analysis of large amounts of data with lots of different variables. Tuning and interpreting these results requires specialized expertise in statistical modeling.
You should evaluate your chosen BI standards against each of these different functional areas, and consider those that are able to effectively address multiple different needs.
User Profiles
You should evaluate the different tools against the specific needs of your end users. Because there is no such thing as a “typical user,” you should first group or segment your users into different profiles. Examples of appropriate profiles may include executives, analysts, general business users, and external users such as customers and partners.
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