Business intelligence
BI (from. engl. Business intelligence — is usually translated as a business intelligence, the business analysis, however, these concepts are wider, than English-language Business intelligence) can be defined as set of the technologies, the software and the practician directed to achievement of goals of business by the best use of the available data. There are two categories of products of a class "a business intelligence — Business Intelligence and Business Analytics. Unfortunately, owing to the historical reasons both of these terms are translated into Russian equally though the first describes reporting system and rather simple OLAP analysis, and the second — very sophisticated means of intellectual and statistical analysis of the structured and unstructured data.
The directory of BI solutions and projects is available on TAdviser.ru
World market of Business Intelligence
Year 2007 was rich in events if to speak about the world market of BI. The most important of them were connected with consolidation of the industry (purchases by the companies Oracle, IBM and SAP specialized suppliers Hyperion, Cognos i Business Objects). Recently analytical company Gartner published results of a research of the market of complex BI platforms. Read article "Business Intelligence (world market)"
Business Intelligence (Russian market)
The market of BI products in Russia, despite a global trend to rapid growth, develops slowly. Contrary to numerous forecasts, automated systems of a business intelligence did not cause high demand in the Russian consumer even at the time of violently growing economic indicators. It is considered that BI solutions are irrelevant for the current level of development of automation in the country. Read article "Business Intelligence (Russian market)"
BI perspective. Functionality
The most earlier known mentioning of BI belongs to Article A Business Intelligence System which appeared in IBM Journal in 1958 in which the purpose of BI is called support of acceptance of business solutions. In this sense of the BI system decision making support systems can consider related. In the course of technology formation and, in many respects, because of problems with data integration, approaches of BI are accented on processes of collecting, transformation and data integration of diverse sources in a form suitable for their analysis and interpretation in terms of business, with providing opportunities of consideration of data in historical perspective, their current and forecast statuses. Therefore refer data integration and questions of creation of data warehouses to the key questions BI. At the same time, according to some experts, excessive concentration on data led to some lead of BI from the purposes of support of acceptance of business solutions, as a result, the concept of BI gradually evolves towards closer integration with business management processes, and means of the developed business intelligence conditionally separate from standard functionality of BI for underlining of the importance of the first. The normal functionality of the BI systems includes construction tools of requests, the reporting and the basic analysis, including the construction tool of user queries, the multidimensional analysis (OLAP), generation of the reporting, dashboards. Refer the funds allocated for more difficult procedures of data analysis to the developed functionality such as Data mining - about intelligent data analysis, means of statistical analysis and forecasting, work benches for specific data domains. As a result of use of BI solutions the common information space created from the integrated external and internal resources forms. Thus, the level of information service of personnel and clients increases. BI allows, by monitoring and the analysis of KPI, to increase management efficiency head and child the organizations. Besides, the analysis, monitoring and control of investments, segmentation of the customer base, upgrade of marketing policy is made. Processes of budgeting, financial planning and control reach due level. It is possible to achieve increase in profitability of supply channels due to detailed adjustment of chains. Drawing up necessary documentation and reporting, both internal, and external, required by different higher and regulatory authorities is important.
Users of a system
It is possible to select four types of users of the systems of a business intelligence:
- analysts
- top managers
- middle managers
- non-management employees
And most important analysts are the first. They are not enough, they have high qualification and are appreciated worth its weight in gold, in fact being "brain" of the company. Not less important users are top managers of the company. As a rule, they understand that the business intelligence can resolve an issue of health of business therefore treat means of BI with a certain piety. The third type of users are middle managers. The orientation of their activity means the solution of a narrow circle of the tasks connected with the field of the performed works. At last, there are also non-management employees for which the business intelligence is necessary for access to up-to-date information and creation of the reporting. Depending on orientation to this or that circle of users also proposed solutions of Business Intelligence differ.
Features and advantages
- the integrated platform. BI represents the complex platform for management of intellectual resources of the enterprise with the built-in analytical tools among which online analytical processing of data (OLAP), means of introduction and data-refresh, means of extraction, conversion and data loading, the data warehouse and function of reports generation. This complex, integrated approach allows the organizations to create and unroll easily the powerful systems for management of intellectual resources of the enterprise, controlling the costs.
- effective decision making. Improvements in the available control functions by intellectual resources of the enterprise, such as OLAP and data-refresh, emergence of the new server of reports, give to the enterprises the chance to transform information at all organizational levels — from the non-management employees working with information to the chief executive.
- security and operational readiness. Parameters of scalability, operational readiness and safety help to ensure to users uninterrupted access to systems for management of intellectual resources of the enterprise and reports.
- possibilities of the analysis on the scale of all enterprise. Advanced means of extraction, conversion and data loading facilitates to the organizations consolidation and data analysis from a set of diverse sources. An opportunity to analyze the data which are stored on computers under control of a broad spectrum operating systems allows the organizations to win competitive advantage due to representation of a complete picture of activity of the enterprise.
- uniform conceptual framework and general information space
- cardinal reducing costs for data collection and processing in the companies with the distributed structure
- increase in efficiency and quality of training of management decisions
- the automated control of key performance indicators of the enterprise.
- operational informing interested persons on deviations of key indicators from the set standards
- optimal use of computing resources of the company, for example, by decrease in load of the settlement systems
- confidentiality of information, differentiation and registration of data access.
Additional advantages: flexible adaptation to needs of users, a user-friendly interface, presentable reports, rich analytical tools, remote access through the Internet, rather rapid implementation, technical support at an operational phase and a possibility of further improvement.
Basic technologies of BI
Progress promptly moves forward. Analysts for fun say that development of IT technologies will stop when all trigram abbreviations are exhausted. Of course, it cannot stop flight of a thought. Began to be used four - and five-alphabetic abbreviations. But the fact remains. In the market of IT services now such huge number of different offers and innovations that the person, ignorant of them, can just get confused. Here what solutions are proposed within BI:
- Digital Dashboard is a dashboard with convenient representation of report forms for current periods with a possibility of the organization of the intuitive graphics image, chart.
- EIS (Executive Information System) is the information system intended for heads.
- ETL (Extract Transform Load) (Extract, Transformation, Loading) are instruments of integration and transformation of data.
- BPM (Business Performance Management) is set of the integrated cyclic management processes and the analysis and also appropriate technologies concerning both financial and to operating activities of the organization. Key BPM processes are connected with strategy implementation of the organization and include financial and operational planning, consolidation and the reporting, modeling, the analysis and monitoring of key performance indicators.
- CRM (Client Relational Management) is the system of adaptation of customer relations aimed at the maximum use of potential of each of them. Within CRM mailings of messages are performed, are ringing, planning of meetings and also the customer base is formed and analyzed.
- ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is the corporate information system (CIS) intended for automation of accounting and management.
Means of information analysis
As much as possible to facilitate work of employees, a number of the above-mentioned means allowing to automate all processing and data analysis is developed. They can be separated into several groups: report generators, means of analytical data processing, a development tool of BI solutions, Enterprise BI Suits, the so-called integrated sets of analytical offers. Tools for reports support all data access mechanisms, they are compatible to DBMS, contain elements of business graphics, interact with office applications, allow to place reports on the Internet. On their base there is a possibility of creation of own unique solutions. In 1993 E.F. Kodd put forward the concept of OLAP. In an analysis result data can be output in the form of tables, cubes where the interrelation more, than two parameters is traced. Desktop OLAP means is applications which allow to make the multidimensional analysis in specific DBMS. Many desktop OLAP means has access to server OLAP storages. Actually they are the client application executing a certain request. Most the enterprises make the analysis and data processing on server OLAP means. Data mining - about intelligent data analysis is a process of search of dependences, trends, interactions, patterns between data which is executed by means of mathematical algorithms. He aims to construct model for forecasting of the processes critical for business planning. Difference of Data mining - about intelligent data analysis from OLAP that the first does not check the available interdependence, and looks for them independently. For example, if OLAP is used, then the question "How Many People at the age of 20 Years Use Services of Fast Food Restaurants?" is set. In case of use of Data mining - about intelligent data analysis the question is formulated so: Whether "There is a typical category of the people visiting fast food restaurants?". In general the list of fixed assets of information analysis looks as follows:
- OLAP (On Line Analytical Processing) makes operational data analysis and serves for drawing up interactive reports.
- Virtualization
- Data mining - about intelligent data analysis — intelligent data analysis. The tool for a difficult research of dependences which helps to reveal the patterns hidden earlier. IAD includes methods and models of statistical analysis and machine learning, separating from them towards automatic data analysis.
- Scorecards is cards of key indicators which allow to sravnenit visually in the form of the graphics image keyword parameters of performance
with strategic tasks
Standards and developments in the field of BI
For unification of any products the important moment are the commonly accepted standards of use and assessment. Strangely enough BI means of similar standards have no. There are no universal languages of requests also to them. The XML for Analysis specification applies for a role of the commonly accepted standard. It was successfully developed and implemented by the companies Hyperion and Microsoft. It describes a universal method of access to the OLAP cubes and models Data mining - about intelligent data analysis placed on the Internet which does not require obligatory installation of client components. Thanks to it it is possible to create universal client OLAP means which will support several server OLAP products at the same time. If to consider all new that is offered in the field of upgrade of BI platforms, it is possible to mention the following sections: development of the operational reporting for mass distribution, means of a task of not regulated requests, development of the latest OLAP tools which will answer questions not "what was?" and "as was?", and "what will be?" and "that if?". There are more convenient dashboards and the interactive visual user interface. There is an opportunity to perform forecast modeling. The latest searching tools are entered.
Difficulties of implementation of BI systems
Despite obvious advantages of BI systems to the large organizations, many heads avoid their implementation. However, those who decide to optimize a company performance thus face some problems. Ignorance of these problems often comes to an end with a large number of laborious work, high costs for maintenance of a system and lack of notable advantage. Read article "Business Intelligence (difficulty of implementation)"
The directory of BI solutions and projects is available on TAdviser.ru
See Also
Links
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