1.1 : What is Business Intelligence and Why Do We Need It?

Business Intelligence means using your data assets to make better business decisions. It’s about access, analysis, and uncovering new opportunities.

Being able to consolidate and analyze large quantities of data in day-to-day operations for better business decisions can often lead to competitive advantage. For example, a nationwide retail clothing chain can tailor store inventories to suit local tastes, an auto insurance company can market to drivers that meet a certain profile, a pharmaceutical company can look for patterns in patient responses to drugs, a bank can determine what services are needed to retain existing customers, and a sales manager can look for trouble spots in geographic territories.

Business Intelligence refers to the ability to make better business decisions through intelligent use of your data assets. It’s about giving access to the right data, analyzing the data for insights, and using the insights to make better decisions.

Today, business intelligence solutions are not just for the chosen few -- the goal is for any appropriate individual to have access to decision enabling information anytime and anywhere. And, business intelligence solutions are not just stand-alone systems -- simplified access to analytical results are being embedded in production applications. Additionally, today’s business intelligence solutions are automatically feeding analysis results back to modify front-office transaction systems for improved profitability.

The ability to gain insights from your data is possible, if you have the right applications and tools to analyze data and more importantly, if the data is prepared in a format suitable for analysis. For a business person, having intuitive applications and tools to analyze data anytime and anywhere is important and for the IT community, having the tools to productively build and manage a scalable and secure environment for Business Intelligence is key.

1.2 What Does the Business Person Need for Business Intelligence?

Business people need a range of Business Intelligence approaches suited to different levels of expertise and different needs for data analysis. Many of these solutions and tools feature built-in support for web browsers and Lotus Notes*, enabling large numbers of users to get secure access to the information they need from within a familiar desktop environment. A new development is the use of information "portals" to personalize access to appropriate information.

1.3 What Does the IT Person Need for Business Intelligence?

Most businesses don’t want ad hoc access to their operational computer systems, either for security or for performance reasons. Rather, they prefer to build a separate system for Business Intelligence applications. To build these systems, tools are needed to extract, cleanse, and transform data from source systems, which may be on a variety of hardware platforms, using a variety of databases. Once the data is prepared for Business Intelligence analysis, the data is stored in a database system and must be refreshed and managed. These systems are called data warehouses or data marts and the process of building and maintaining these systems is called data warehouse or data mart generation and management.

1.4 What Do User Need To Know About Their Data?

A business user may want to know the business definition of a data element, when the data was last refreshed, what reports include the data, etc. On the technical side, information is needed to track such things as when to schedule an extract program, data about the tables in the target database, etc. These types of information about data are called metadata and are integral to the process of analyzing data and maintaining/managing the data warehouse or data mart. Both business and technical metadata need to be managed.

1.2 Business Intelligence Solutions

What comprises a Business Intelligence solution?
Today’s managers know that no matter what the core business, they are in the "information business". They must drive decisions that directly influence results. Businesses that effectively use information to manage and impact decision-making will have the greatest competitive advantage.

Quite simply, a Business Intelligence solution involves the gathering, managing, and analyzing of data -- and then transforming it into useful, actionable information. So it’s gather, manage and analyze... transform it into information... and use it to run the organization. It’s about creating an information-driven e-business.

One element of Business Intelligence solutions is the analytic application that provides in-depth analysis of business operations leading to better decision-making. The analytic application uses data prepared for analysis and stored in what is typically called a data warehouse or data mart.

So a complete Business Intelligence solution combines several elements:

1.3 Knowing Your Customer

Are John Doe, J. Doe, and Jon Do three different customers? Maybe two? How about one? Sorting it out may mean the difference between success and failure, because in business, competitive battles are typically won by those who know their customers best.

Knowing the customer better is one of the fundamental drivers behind today’s business intelligence solutions. But it’s not an easy task if your data is ambiguous. "Creative" data entry, differing standards for different application systems, and freeform text fields all contribute to incomplete or inaccurate information about your customers -- information that may be key to marketing plans, accurate budgeting, and even protection from fraud and account delinquencies. That’s why data re-engineering is critical to a successful business intelligence system.

Data re-engineering automatically transforms imperfect data -- from multiple legacy and external sources -- into an accurate, consolidated view of your business, even across different IT systems, departments, and business lines. Through low-level data investigation, strong data-typing, and entity identification, data re-engineering attains the highest levels of data quality in the information systems critical to your business; it ensures the accuracy and validity of data values, and achieves critical entity or logical key integrity.

"Entity integrity" is something that happens when all the pieces of a business entity (e.g., a customer) are logically linked or physically integrated into a single set of attributes. Failure to identify complex relationships buried within freeform text fields (or hidden across millions of records) will invariably cause inaccurate responses to end user queries, and greatly diminish the effectiveness of data-mining trend analysis

1.4 Building the Market, Data Warehouse

In the 21st century, only the most competitive companies will achieve sustained market success. These organizations will be able to leverage information about their marketplace, customers, and operations, in order to capitalize on business opportunities. A central part of their plan for long-term success will be an advanced data warehouse, where information from various applications or parts of the business can be integrated.
Business Intelligence allows you to start small and grow fast. Starting small helps businesses gain experience and build on success. Business Intelligence provides integrated, easy-to-use features for building, managing, and automating your warehouse processes. But the mark of a superior e-business infrastructure is in its ability to grow and change with your business, even when you exceed your own.


1.5 The Users’ Attraction

A successful Business Intelligence system will attract lots of users - more users than you probably realize exist. These users will have different needs, different skill sets, and different expectations. Many of them will not even be part of your company but you need to support them all.

As your user community expands, you need to choose the delivery mechanism that’s right for each type of user - from sophisticated mining and analytical tools for the most sophisticated "power" users, to simple subscription / publication models for casual users. Business Intelligence business partners guarantee you’ll be able to find the right tool for the job.

1.6 Enterprise Information Portal

1.6.1 What Is It and Why Do I Need It?

An Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) provides a single, web-based interface into what would otherwise be disconnected and incompatible data spread across numerous separate applications. Modeled after Yahoo or Excite on the public Internet, they allow "one-stop shopping" for information, pointing the user to what’s new and important, providing personalized views, and including both free-form search and predefined information roadmaps.

The requirements underlying EIPs are rooted in a number of continuing industry trends:

The push for horizontal integration has resulted in an unprecedented need to share business information, which used to be relatively self-contained within departmental-level systems. Meanwhile, the problem of information overload has resulted in a focus on personalized information delivery, with "narrow-casting" of exactly the right information at precisely the right time. The push for both cost savings and high quality has created tremendous pressure for simple, flexible, but powerful computer applications. And today’s mind-boggling rate of change has made it necessary to architect computer systems out of simple, easily-changeable building blocks, using vendor-independent standards whenever possible.

Recognition of the central role of documents in business has already prompted most organizations to embark on enterprise-wide document initiatives, integrated with process re-engineering efforts and picking up on the success of the Internet in promoting large-scale access to information. In general, the ideal goal is "just in time" information, retrieved and

assembled as needed, freely accessible and exchangeable across diverse systems, and filtered to be both manageable and usable. Today, the Internet has become the primary focal point for enterprise-level EDM systems development, and the idea of EIPs has become the next logical step.

1.6.2 What application areas are using Portals?

From an end-user point of view, EIPs are being implemented for a wide variety of reasons. In a survey of 300 companies conducted by Delphi Group, top applications for EIPs were listed as:

Here are a few statistics from industry analysts that highlight customer’s interest in Portal solutions: