Business Intelligence Overview

Source: Cherry Tree & Co.

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence (BI) applications are decision support tools that enable real-time, interactive access, analysis and manipulation of mission-critical corporate information. The goals for Business intelligence projects are to provide information used to:

Support internal enterprise users in the assessment, enhancement and optimization of organizational performance & operation. Deliver critical business information to end-users about value chain constituencies such as customers and supply-chain partners.

End-users can utilize the BI tools to "drill-down" and "slice and dice" to gain a better understanding of transactional and operational information; for example, Star Schema and OLAP are usually used for provide this functionality.

Business Intelligence
Customer

Inventory

Marketing Data Mart

OLAP

Credit

ETL tools
Sales

Data Warehouse

Finance Data Mart

BI

Operation

Distribution Data Mart

Reports

External

Pivot Table

Business Intelligence Tools Introduction

Operational Data Source: Business Intelligence system collects data from various sources including operation database, OLTP, ERP, legacy apps, external database and etc. ETL tools (Extract, Transform, Load) are used to pull data from source database, transform the data so that it is compatible with the data warehouse and then load it into data warehouse. A Data Warehouse is a "Subject-Oriented, Integrated, TimeVariant, Nonvolatile collection of data in support of decision making". Data Warehouses tend to have these distinguishing features: (1) Use a subject oriented dimensional data model; (2) Contain publishable data from potentially multiple sources and; (3) Contain integrated reporting tools.

Data Warehouse usually adopts Star Schema data structure for optimizing the performance of data analysis and reporting.

Star Schema

A Star schema is optimized for data analysis as is typically required in a Decision Support System. A star schema has a fact table surrounded by dimension tables

Data Mart

A data mart is a repository of data gathered from operational data and other sources that is designed to serve a particular community of knowledge workers. The data may derive from an enterprise-wide database or data warehouse or be more specialized.

The emphasis of a data mart is on meeting the specific demands of a particular group of knowledge users in terms of analysis, content, presentation, and ease-of-use. Users of a data mart can expect to have data presented in terms that are familiar.

On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP)

Literally, On-Line Analytical Processing. Designates a category of applications and technologies that allow the collection, storage, manipulation and reproduction of multidimensional data, with the goal of analysis. Example: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/bernard.lupin/english

Pivot Table

A pivot table is a great reporting tool that allows for slicing and dicing data.

Analytical Software Market

Analytical Software Revenue
$6.00 $5.20 $5.00 $4.10 $4.00

(In Billions)

$3.20 $3.00 $2.00 $1.00 $0.00 $1.90 $1.50 $2.50

1998

1999

2000 Year

2001

2002 Revenue

2003

OLAP Market

Strategic, Tactical & Functional Benefits of Business Intelligence