What is Business Intelligence (BI)?

Even back in 1958, professionals wrote in an article that appeared in the IBM Journal of a future in which organizations and individuals would create more and more information, which will be obtained, processed, stored, and divided by automatic and intelligent systems in order to aid the activities of the organizations in the best possible way. Although at that time information was taken to mean something else (paper documents), the article adeptly prophesized the operation of data warehouses.

Almost 30 years later, business intelligence was defined as all those methods and definitions that improve the decision making process with the help of fact based systems. However, all of this was not enough for the term and the expression to become widespread, since it only appeared in IT vocabulary by the end of the 1990’s.

But the first, and the simplest, BI solution was already in use at the time, which practically everyone has used at one time or another. This is none other than the spreadsheet manager Excel. It is unbelievably simple to create tables, reports, diagrams, and executive reports with this program.No other program has yet been developed that is more flexible or easier to use. Almost all BI tools prepare reports and diagrams similar to those made by Excel, but unfortunately the talents of Excel are limited.It is not capable of handling data consisting of several million entries, and these cannot be automatically harmonized with various source systems. And it does not have a refined authorization system. Luckily, this has changed thanks to the development of business intelligence.Today, we can state that business intelligence is a collective term that was created to provide for the uniform handling and referencing of those systems, tools, and technologies that aim to provide support and improvement for the decision-making process.
 

The technologies included in the above definition of business intelligence are the following:

• Data warehouses;
• OLAP (multidimensional database managers);
• Business planning, forecasting, and consolidation applications;
• Reporting applications;
• Dashboard scorecard systems;
• Performance monitoring systems;
• Data mining, text mining, and voice mining;
• Data visualization .
   

Business intelligence, as a collective term, includes the following:

• Decision support systems (DSS)
• Management information system (MIS)
• Executive information system (EIS)
   

Why do companies apply business intelligence systems?

Companies apply business intelligence systems in order to improve the availability of existing data. This ensures that they can access their data easier, faster, and in a wider spectrum in the manner and the format that their work requires.
 

What else can we use business intelligence systems for?

• Preparing reports and statements
• Preparing dashboards and management dashboards
• Business and statistical analyses
• Planning, forecasting, and business modelling
• Comparative analyses
• Client segmentation, fraud detection, credit analysis, cross-sales analysis
• Sales analysis
• The geographical analysis of data
• Data visualization, graphs, visual aids
• Data, text, and voice mining

However, business intelligence allows us to create practically any kind of analyses. This depends only on you and your creativity, as it can be used for anything that can be analysed through data, voice, pictures, or text.
 

The introduction of business intelligence

Several different software applications are generally required for the introduction of a business intelligence system. A database manager program is generally needed, in which the data required for the analysis is stored; a data loader that enables us to provide the business intelligence system with data; and a visual through which we can search the data of the BI system, modify its model, and develop the authorizations.

In order to assemble a business intelligence system, we need to apply several technologies. For example, we will be using database managing, data loading, and reporting technologies, which can be grouped according to their complexity and the size of their potential to provide a business value:

• Reporting technologies that provide an answer to the question of what happened. This includes querying, reporting, and search business intelligence technologies.
• Analysis technologies, that provide an answer to the question of why. This includes OLAP and data visualization technologies.
• Monitoring technologies that provide an answer to the question of what is happening now. This includes performance management tools, dashboards, and scorecard technologies.
• And forecasting technologies that provide an answer to the question of what could happen? This category includes forecasting and data mining technologies.
   

The services we provide

• Consultancy
• Building universes and data warehouses, developing applications, and reports
• The continued development and takeover of existing systems
• Operation
• Training
   

References