How can Business Intelligence benefit your Organization?
Business intelligence has become a critical element of information technology. It's an old term with general or even ambiguous meaning. It has been used synonymously with decision support, analysis, and data warehousing, but today business intelligence has a more specific definition and a better understood application. Taken literally, business intelligence is just that-intelligence or understanding of your business. You get that understanding by analyzing your business operations.
That analysis is accomplished by collecting the information that represents your marketing, sales, and service activities, the behavior of your customers in responding to these activities, and the behavior of your internal systems and your suppliers' systems in responding to your customers' behavior. Once you have collected this information, and its collection is a continuous process, not a one-time event, you organize and store it in a manner to facilitate its access, processing, and presentation through a broad range of techniques including, reporting, query and analysis, OLAP, and data mining. Finally, you use the results of applying these techniques to improve your business operations and start the analysis cycle all over again.
This business intelligence process can deliver significant, bottom-line results. Implementing its technologies and applying its process can help make your business more effective and more efficient, increasing revenue, decreasing costs, and improving your relationships with customers and suppliers.
Business Intelligence Platforms
In order to deliver business intelligence to the widest audience and to maximize the benefits that it can deliver its technologies must be organized. They must be deployed within an infrastructure with the capabilities to implement the business intelligence processes to support the range of applications best suited to every user of every type. We call that infrastructure a business intelligence platform.
Business intelligence platforms should include the following technologies. Each technology should implement the capabilities described below.
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Data Warehouse Databases.
A business intelligence platform should support both relational and multidimensional data warehousing databases. In addition, storage models should support the distribution of data across both and data models should support transparent or near-transparent access to data, wherever it's stored. |
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OLAP.
OLAP is a critical business intelligence platform component. It is the most widely used approach to analysis. Business intelligence platforms must provide OLAP support within their databases, OLAP functionality, interfaces to OLAP functionality, and OLAP build and manage capabilities.
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Data Mining.
Data mining has reached the mainstream. It is a critical business intelligence platform capability. Platforms should include data mining functionality that offers a range of algorithms that can operate on data warehouse data.
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Interfaces.
Business intelligence platforms should provide open interfaces to data warehouse databases, OLAP, and data mining. Where appropriate, interfaces should comply with standards. Open, standards-based interfaces make it easier both to buy and to build applications that use the facilities of a business intelligence platform.
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Build and Manage Capabilities.
Business intelligence platforms should provide the capabilities to build and manage data warehouses in their data warehouse databases. Build capabilities should include the implementation of data warehouse models, the extraction, movement, transformation, and cleansing of data from operational sources, and the initial loading and incremental updating of data warehouses according to their models. A wide range of data sources should be supported including databases, files, and the data of popular packaged software. Transformation capabilities should be powerful and flexible. Predefined transformations should be packaged. They should be extensible through programming languages. Manage capabilities should cover all platform resources-users, data, and processes. Strong and flexible prepackaged capabilities are essential. Good use should be made of visual tools
The business intelligence platform should provide good integration across these technologies. It should be a coherent platform, not a set of diverse and heterogeneous technologies. For example, a single toolset should provide build and manage capabilities across both relational and multidimensional data warehouses. |
Benefits of Business Intelligence
The first question has always been in terms of Return on Investment on Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence implementations. A study by International Data Corporation (IDC) showed that Data Warehousing could provide significant and impressive ROI numbers. The study, which included 62 participants, demonstrated that the overall ROI on warehouse projects was 401% with payback periods of two to three years. What was interesting about the study, however was that the smaller, departmental implementations, known as Data Marts, had a 533% ROI, while the larger, enterprise efforts showed an impressive 322% ROI. Typically Data Warehouses and Business Intelligence solutions offer these kinds of benefits:
Cost avoidance benefits
These benefits were the ability not to spend money that is presently spent on generating endless reports to end-users. This included the resources expended by IT to generate answers on ad hoc queries. In many ways, Data Warehousing represents liberation for IT by providing users with the tools they have needed over the years to generate their own reports.
Higher productivity
Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence solutions can increase overall enterprise productivity by reducing the decision making cycle time. Information search and organizing times are drastically reduced.
Benefits through better analytical capability
Data Warehouses and Business Intelligence solutions unearth hidden patterns and trends, which was previously not feasible. Such insights and knowledge help increase revenues, identify new markets, new customers and for reducing costs.
Link corporate strategy with operational targets
Data Warehousing & Business Intelligence solutions along with performance management can help to solve the existing disconnect between strategic corporate initiatives with operational targets.
Collaborative commerce
The increasing power of the web has made collaborative commerce a possibility. Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence solutions are able to integrate and analyze data not only within an organization, but also out it to present a holistic picture about the enterprise.
Achieve customer centricity
Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence solutions enable enterprises to move over from a product centric business model to a customer centric business model. By integrating all data related to a customer into a single organized Database, with analytical power, enterprises can exploit the benefits of cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.
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