Introduction to Business Intelligence

Now a days, we hear lots and lots of News about the Business Intelligence…. So out of curiosity, I tried to learn what is Business Intelligence all about, how it works, what are the different process flow, what is difference between business user & business analyst, how different roles are assign to business intelligence, etc…etc…etc….

And finally I land up with a very good document which have a good explanation and almost all my questions were answered…

Main aim of all tasks for any organization is to understand the data, analyse the data and based on analysis they can take an informed decisions. Overall Business Intelligence is dependent on the Decision Making Process.

 Decision Making is very important aspect in order to drive profitability of any business. This entire process is broadly classified in to three main categories 1. Operational decision 2. Tactical Decision 3. Strategic Decision

All the decisions are taken based on identifying the problems exist within the organizations, finding the different solutions for the problem based on models and selecting best model from available solutions to take precise decisions.

Data is information, analysis is getting the knowledge, integrating the multiple knowledge iteam and taking the decisions is main core area of Business Intelligence.

Above picture will give a better understanding of entire cycle. where user applies the intelligence to data and produce the information which will provide the user certain knowledge which will help them in decision making and actions.

In above slide we can see the probable sources of knowledge.

Expert knowledge : is something gained by the passing the information to expert in probable problem areas. or gained by taking the training from experts.

Entire decision making process is something where multiple functional groups work together to make entire flow very smooth.  One main source is IT team which help the manager and analyst to provide a robust IT infrastructure ( softwares, data management, applications etc) which help them in taking the decision at a faster pace.

After the IT team support organization need different operational and analytical applications to analyze the data on proper form.

When we talk about the entire system, following are the basic things that any one needs to understand….

And the first thing is “Business Intelligence”

Business intelligence is a technology that made up of few basic components

• Data integration process
• Information gathering process
• Query of existing information 
• Statistical analysis using predictive modeling and forecasting tools
• Creating different dash board that provide mission critical information
• Viewing all informations in a single platform or portal to take the proper decisions.

Good figure above gives excellent explanation about the Business Intelligence.

Information in any organization can come from variety of sources like products data, marketing data or customer data… etc.  All of this information is integrated in to a common data base with application of business logics which is known as data ware house. Which will help analyst to perform the analysis in proper form.

 Data warehouse is based on arranging a data in multidimensional data structure which help in fetching the data for reporting and analysis at a great speed and user or analyst can have 360* view of the data to take faster decision. (Multi-dimensional data  for a laymen is some thing similar to pivot tables that we can generate   in excel. )

 Such OLAP cubes, which are part of Business Intelligence Technology can help in accessing the required information from the data warehouse very fast. Particularly when now every one is taking about the the “BIG DATA” , OLAP becomes very handy in faster accessing of the informations.

Another technology that can also be integrated with BI is a Data Mining. which help in building a model and applying the model in to the data to know more about the pattern and predict the future.

Combination of Business Intelligence and Data Mining will create new reports and discover the new knowledge from existing data which help in taking the proper decision.

In short, entire Business Intelligence can be describe using the above Pyramid according the tasks and job roles

Onces data is gathered, first person to work on this is DBA.

DBA: Gather the data from different sources like paper based data, transactional data, other form of data.
          DBA put different form of data in to same format and build a Data ware house. SAS Data Integration Studio is one of the leading tool that used to create a data mart.

Data Analyst: Once Data is ready, job role for data analyst is to understand the requirement from business users ( decision makers) , what types of report and analysis is required. Based on requirement gathered, business analyst start mapping the data, querying data, creation of information map and perform the statistical analysis to get most knowledge out of it.

Business Analyst: work on different tools to create a sophisticated reports and dashboard and graphs which gives the end user flexibility to view the key processes within the organization. SAS applications used for this is SAS Web report studio, SAS Dashboard, Enterprise Guide and  Information delivery portal to create a certain portals where all informations like reports, graphs, dashboards are combine together in a single page.

End user: Are also known as a Decision makers who view these portals and take the decisions about the business.

Above Figure gives and clear idea about how all tools for Business Intelligence and integrated or associated with each other. In short these are known as a three tier support system where one is towards the warehouse database server, second is OLAP and DI server and third is Clients server where reporting and analysis can be done.

Also when we see the capability of Business intelligence: As per old definition BI was restricted towards data access, data management and reporting part which was able to give answer about what is happening now in the organizations

But as per the SAS, New business intelligence is much more than this.

New Business intelligence tool is also capable to view what will happen next and how to optimize the business tool so that we can avoid forecasted future problem and take the in- advance informed decisions.

Here are some of the business intelligence layers we can think of.

Source system layer is from where the data is coming within the system for analysis. Source of data can be any CRM system, finance, HR, sales, marketing etc.
Warehouse layer is where all the data gathered from different sources are integrated in form of data warehouse
Reporting layer is something where based on data analysis and reporting is done which help in taking the business decision.

As per the sun’s vision for BI Application, it talks about how data or information can be turned in to valuable information which help organization to increase the profitability.