Contemporary business intelligence (BI) solutions should enable business users to easily author, publish, and distribute enterprise reports via a fully integrated report writer, with an easy-to-use report-creation wizard. Users will also have the power to customize and tailor reports to specific information needs. Report writing and graphing capabilities should enable even non-technical users to easily create and share clear representations of complex business conditions. In addition to being easy to use, report writers must also incorporate advanced features like exception filtering and highlighting, calculations with sub-queries, rankings, drill-through, and more.
Part Two of the Business Intelligence Report series.
In general, contemporary BI tools provide graphical analysis of business information in multidimensional views. Most companies collect a large amount of data from their business operations, and to keep track of that information, users would need to use a wide range of software programs, such as Microsoft Excel and Access (mostly on the lower-end of the market) and other, more sophisticated database applications for departments throughout their organization. Using multiple software programs makes it difficult to retrieve information in a timely manner and to perform analysis of the data.
The term business intelligence (BI) thus represents all the tools and systems that play a key role in the strategic planning process of the corporation, by allowing a company to gather, store, access, and analyze corporate data to aid in decision-making. Generally, these systems will illustrate BI in the areas of customer profiling, customer support, market research, market segmentation, product profitability, statistical analysis, and inventory and distribution analysis, to name only a few.
The BI applications have not experienced the "boom-and-bust" cycle of adjacent enterprise application areas, and their need has been neither over- nor under-hyped. It has recently become one of the key enterprise software sectors, given that skimpy IT budgets have espoused the importance of getting the most out of existing IT assets. BI should provide an environment in which business users receive information that is reliable, consistent, understandable, and easily manipulated. C-level executives and middle management have always had a need to understand their business' performance regardless of good or bad economic times, and while the output from BI might change, the need is always there.
Particularly relative are the recent massive demise of dot-com companies, moderately optimistic economic forecasts, the stringent Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX, see Attributes of Sarbanes-Oxley Tool Sets), and many other mandatory reporting regulatory requirements, such as those from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), following up the high-profile corporate fraud scandals (e.g., Enron and WorldCom) or bioterrorism threats. These have increased executives' focus on understanding and managing corporate performance. One should also expect the future use of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to further drive up the amount of data a business generates, and the importance of being able to report on and make sense out of that information (see RFID—A New Technology Set to Explode?).
BI tools have neither been terribly complex nor expensive to deploy (compared to their extended enterprise resource planning [ERP] counterparts), and have been helpful in facilitating decision-making process, yet, lately, they have become considered a necessity rather than only a luxury. Also, nowadays, decisions are increasingly made at ever lower levels in organizations, thus the need for reliable information is even more pertinent. For more of pertinent information, see Business Intelligence Success, Lessons Learned and What's Really Driving Business Intelligence?.
To that end, various BI solutions enable organizations to track, understand, and manage enterprise performance, and leverage information that is stored in an array of corporate databases and data warehouses (DW), legacy systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), customer resource management (CRM) and other related enterprise applications. Naturally, the market has gone through a number of evolutionary steps on a journey that began with pesky "green bar" reports printed from mainframe computers in the 1960s and 1970s. These reports were infamously poor at pinpointing critical information. Moreover, they often arrived on managers' desks a week or so after month-end, and were a far cry after the fact that they were "rear view" reports.
Driven by technological progress in the decades since, the evolution of BI has embraced everything from queries and reports to executive information systems (EIS), which extract data to provide a view of quantitative performance measures on-line (a new generation will provide this information in near-real time). It has encompassed on-line analytical processing (OLAP) technology; data mining, digital cockpits, and dashboards to portals and other broadcasting tools. These all have has a common aim to provide more timely information, filtered for importance and in a context that supports better decision-making.
Nowadays, popular uses of BI include management dashboards and balanced scorecards, collaborative applications, workflows and alerts, analytics, enterprise reporting, financial reporting, and customer and partner extranets. These solutions, some of which will be described in more detail later in this series, will enable companies to gain visibility into their business, acquire and retain profitable customers, and reduce costs. They will also be able to detect patterns, optimize the supply chain, analyze project or product portfolios, increase productivity, and improve financial performance. Data visibility problems are possibly the easiest and most rewarding obstacles to solve when it comes to improving business performance.
Part Two of the Business Intelligence Report series.
In general, contemporary BI tools provide graphical analysis of business information in multidimensional views. Most companies collect a large amount of data from their business operations, and to keep track of that information, users would need to use a wide range of software programs, such as Microsoft Excel and Access (mostly on the lower-end of the market) and other, more sophisticated database applications for departments throughout their organization. Using multiple software programs makes it difficult to retrieve information in a timely manner and to perform analysis of the data.
The term business intelligence (BI) thus represents all the tools and systems that play a key role in the strategic planning process of the corporation, by allowing a company to gather, store, access, and analyze corporate data to aid in decision-making. Generally, these systems will illustrate BI in the areas of customer profiling, customer support, market research, market segmentation, product profitability, statistical analysis, and inventory and distribution analysis, to name only a few.
The BI applications have not experienced the "boom-and-bust" cycle of adjacent enterprise application areas, and their need has been neither over- nor under-hyped. It has recently become one of the key enterprise software sectors, given that skimpy IT budgets have espoused the importance of getting the most out of existing IT assets. BI should provide an environment in which business users receive information that is reliable, consistent, understandable, and easily manipulated. C-level executives and middle management have always had a need to understand their business' performance regardless of good or bad economic times, and while the output from BI might change, the need is always there.
Particularly relative are the recent massive demise of dot-com companies, moderately optimistic economic forecasts, the stringent Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX, see Attributes of Sarbanes-Oxley Tool Sets), and many other mandatory reporting regulatory requirements, such as those from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), following up the high-profile corporate fraud scandals (e.g., Enron and WorldCom) or bioterrorism threats. These have increased executives' focus on understanding and managing corporate performance. One should also expect the future use of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to further drive up the amount of data a business generates, and the importance of being able to report on and make sense out of that information (see RFID—A New Technology Set to Explode?).
BI tools have neither been terribly complex nor expensive to deploy (compared to their extended enterprise resource planning [ERP] counterparts), and have been helpful in facilitating decision-making process, yet, lately, they have become considered a necessity rather than only a luxury. Also, nowadays, decisions are increasingly made at ever lower levels in organizations, thus the need for reliable information is even more pertinent. For more of pertinent information, see Business Intelligence Success, Lessons Learned and What's Really Driving Business Intelligence?.
To that end, various BI solutions enable organizations to track, understand, and manage enterprise performance, and leverage information that is stored in an array of corporate databases and data warehouses (DW), legacy systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), customer resource management (CRM) and other related enterprise applications. Naturally, the market has gone through a number of evolutionary steps on a journey that began with pesky "green bar" reports printed from mainframe computers in the 1960s and 1970s. These reports were infamously poor at pinpointing critical information. Moreover, they often arrived on managers' desks a week or so after month-end, and were a far cry after the fact that they were "rear view" reports.
Driven by technological progress in the decades since, the evolution of BI has embraced everything from queries and reports to executive information systems (EIS), which extract data to provide a view of quantitative performance measures on-line (a new generation will provide this information in near-real time). It has encompassed on-line analytical processing (OLAP) technology; data mining, digital cockpits, and dashboards to portals and other broadcasting tools. These all have has a common aim to provide more timely information, filtered for importance and in a context that supports better decision-making.
Nowadays, popular uses of BI include management dashboards and balanced scorecards, collaborative applications, workflows and alerts, analytics, enterprise reporting, financial reporting, and customer and partner extranets. These solutions, some of which will be described in more detail later in this series, will enable companies to gain visibility into their business, acquire and retain profitable customers, and reduce costs. They will also be able to detect patterns, optimize the supply chain, analyze project or product portfolios, increase productivity, and improve financial performance. Data visibility problems are possibly the easiest and most rewarding obstacles to solve when it comes to improving business performance.
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