Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence (BI) is the ways in which we store and use business information. It encompasses the technologies, applications, and means for collecting, integrating, analyzing, and presentating bsuienss data. Using data that has been stored in a data warehouse, software applications are able to use this data to report past business information as well as predict future business information, including trends, threats, chances and patterns. Popular BI applications are very complicated and professionals in this field are in high demand. Some of the currently popular enterprise level systems, which can manage information about all of the business functions and systems, are sold and implemented by Oracle, SAP, IBM, and Hewlett Packard (HP). Companies usually need in-house professionals in these systems to assist with the implementation and the on-going use of these systmes, which are quite complicated!
It is usually difficult to provide a positive business case for Business Intelligence (BI) initiatives and usually the projects will need to be prioritized through strategic initiatives.
Here are some hints to increase the benefits for a BI project.
* As described by Kimball you must determine the tangible benefits such as get rid ofd cost of producing legacy reports.
* Enforce access to data for the entire organization. In this way even a small benefit, such as some minutes saved, will make a difference when it is multiplied by the number of employees in the entire organization.
* As described by Ross, Weil & Roberson for Enterprise Architecture, consider letting the BI project be driven by other business initiatives with first-rate business cases. To support this approach, the organization must have Enterprise Architects, which will be able to detect suitable business projects.
Even though there could be many factors that could affect the implementation procedure of a BI system, research by Naveen K. Vodapalli shows that the following are the crucial success factors for business intelligence implementation:
1. Business-driven methodology and project management
2. Clear vision and research
3. Committed management support & sponsorship
4. Data management and quality
5. Mapping solutions to user requirements
6. Performance considerations of the BI system
7. Robust and expandable framework
What will the future of Business Inteligence be like? Here are some of the theories being discussed:
* Because of lack of information, procedures, and tools, through 2012, more than 35 percent of the top 5,000 worldwide companies will often fail to make insightful choices about important changes in their business and markets.
* By 2012, business units will control at the very least 40 percent of the total budget for business intelligence.
* By 2010, 20 per cent of organizations will have an industry-specific analytic application delivered via software as a service as a standard component of their business intelligence portfolio.
* In 2009, collaborative decision making emerged as a new product category that puts together social software with business intelligence platform capabilities.
* By 2012, one-third of analytic applications applied to business procedures will be delivered through coarse-grained application mashups.