Business Intelligence

What is Business Intelligence (BI)?

Business intelligence is a field of practical application that takes data from various areas in a business and collates the data. Then significant information is extracted that allows management to make informed decisions to improve their business success. There will usually be a body of historic and current business data that can be used to establish predictive models or to draw out significant relationships within the data.

Business Intelligence Tools

There are many hundreds of BI 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 simial data together to neural network / block box approaches. Different methods will reveal different types of relationships or patterns in the data.

At Consolidata, we use SQL Server 2005 BI suite which offers significant OLAP processing capabilities as well as dashboarding technologies.

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If you would like help in measuring your KPIs, please get in touch with us.