Business Intelligence
What is BI?
Business intelligence (BI) is a field of practical application that takes data from various
areas in a business and collates the data. Usually the collated data will be placed into a
data warehouse
upon which OLAP cubes will usually be built. Significant information is then able to be extracted
that allows management to make informed decisions to improve their business success.
In addition to current data, it is usual to load a few years of historic data. This can be used
to establish predictive models or to draw out significant relationships within the
data.
Business Intelligence Tools
There are many hundreds of business intelligence tools, but they fall into a small number of categories.
Dashboard
- These are usually high level display tools aimed at giving a quick overview of
a particular business or department. Often these will display significant business
measurements referred to as
KPIs
On Line Analytical Processing
(OLAP) - A set of tools that allow interactive examination
of large quantities of data from different perspectives. There are a number of different
'flavours' of OLAP - MOLAP, HOLAP and ROLAP - which give dfferent performance advantages
for different types of source data and update frequency.
Data Mining - This is a diverse set of tools ranging from various statistical methods
for grouping similar data together to neural network / black box approaches. Different
methods will reveal different types of relationships or patterns in the data.
At Consolidata, we specialise in the
Microsoft SQL Server 2005
technology suite
which offers significant OLAP processing capabilities as well as dashboarding technologies.