Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence
Business intelligence is referred as all the necessary technologies, practices, skills and applications which are used to help the business to understand the commercial context of the business. Business intelligence can also be referred to as all the collected information.
All the predictive, current, and historical views of all the business operations are provided by the Business Intelligence. Text mining, analytics, business performance management, OLAP, data mining, predictive analytics, reporting and benchmarks are some of the common functions of the technologies of Business Intelligence.
A Business Intelligence system is also called the decision support system (DSS) as it often helps in making better business decisions.
HISTORY
Hans Peter Luhn an IBM researcher used Business Intelligence as a term in an article in 1958. He gave the definition to intelligence as ‘the ability of capturing the interrelationships between all the presented facts in a way to guide all the actions towards the desired goal.’
Howard Dresner in 1989 who later became a Gartner Group analyst provided Business Intelligence as the umbrella term which was used to describe ‘methods and concepts for improving the decision making of the business by making use of all the fact based support system.’ This usage became widespread in the late 1990s.
Data warehousing and Business Intelligence
All the data used by the Business Intelligence is gathered from a data mart or data warehouse. However, all the data warehouses are not used for business intelligence and all the business intelligence applications do not require data warehouse.
Business Intelligence uses the data of the company to help the decision-makers in the decision making process, which means anticipating actions and understanding the current functioning for the completely informed steering of enterprise.
The use of intelligence information system forms the basis of intelligence tools. The intelligence information system is supplied with different data which has been extracted from information related to the company or its economic data and environment or from production data. Data marts or Data Warehouses are used for the process of taking out data for decision makers.
A tool which is used for extracting all the data from the different available resources, loading them, cleaning them up into the data warehouse is called Extract, Transform and Load (ETL).
Analytic Intelligence is the tool which makes it possible to create the representations on the basis of questions for creating border tables, which is called reporting.
COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE
Competitive intelligence is used as a synonym for the term Business Intelligence.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND ITS FUTURE
Gartner paper 2009 predicted certain developments in the business intelligence market as follows
·Due to lack of information, tolls, and processes, through 2012, 5000 of the top global companies, more than 35 per cent will regularly fail to make any insightful decision about any significant change in their markets and business.
·40 per cent of the total budget for the business intelligence will be controlled by business units, by 2012.
·20 per cent of the organizations by 2010 will have an analytic application for the industry-specific delivered through software as a service as the standard component of the business intelligence portfolio.
·Collaborative decision making in 2009 will emerge as the new product category which combines all the social software with the platform capabilities of business intelligence.
·One-third of the analytic applications by 2012 applied to the business processes which will bw delivered through the coarse-grained application mashups.