Business Intelligence can use data gathered from data warehouses, servers or data marts. Data warehouse are not necessarily to be used, as not all data warehouses are used for business intelligence.
BI uses a set of tools to identify opportunities, develop strategies and implement them. These tools are softwares developed to retrieve, analyze and report data. These tools mostly use data which has been previously stored.
The main BI tools:
-Spreadsheets are computer applications with tools that can be used for increasing the user’s productivity in analyzing and sharing data sets. A table(tabular) with multiple cells in a two-dimensional matrix or grids with rows and columns can both be displayed in the spreadsheet. The cells contain formulas, alphanumeric characters and numeric values, which can be used for calculuses. These operations can be done simultaneous to the table completion. The formula is used to calculate the contents of a cell or a combination of cells. Sometimes, spreadsheets contain a pseudo third dimension which is applied as another layer or sheet.
-Reporting software applications can be used to generate reports from various data sources. These reports are generated to be human readable. The most important component is the server, so companies have developed extra tools which can be very helpful. Some tools like Designer, Builder or Library can really make our work easier.
-OLAP (or online analytical processing) is an approach to answer MDA (multi-dimensional analytical) queries. OLAP is a category which includes reporting and data mining at the same time. Reporting, marketing, management, BPM, budgeting, forecasting or financial reporting are typical applications. OLAP is OLTP (online transaction processing) modified.
This tools enable users to analyze data from multiple perspectives.
Its basic operations are:
-consolidation: aggregation of data computed in one or more dimensions.
-drill down: allows users to navigate through details.
-slicing and dicing: users can take out a set of data and view it from different viewpoints.
-Digital dashboards are “easy to read, real-time user interface, with a graphical presentation of the status and historical data to enable instantaneous and informed decision at a first glance.”-Data mining is the analysis step of the KDD - the process that results in discovery of new patterns in large data sets. The methods used for this are a intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and DBMS. Its goal is to extract knowledge from a data set and transform it into a structure for a later use.
-Data warehouses (DW or DWH) are DB used for reporting and analysis. The data is uploaded and stored into the warehouse from the operational systems (OS).-Decision engineering is a framework which unifies a number of practices for organizational decision. It is based on recognition. It seeks to overcome a decision making, characterized by a mismatch between the sophistication of organizational practices and the complexity of a situation. This seeks to solve issues around complexity theory and organizations.
-Process mining is a business process analysis technique for the analysis based on event logs. It extracts knowledge from event logs recorded by the system. This aims at discovering process control, data, organizational and social structures just from event logs.
-Business performance management - a set of management and analytical processes that assess an organization’s performance.
Business intelligence tools are used by every known organization or company. These are tools which help speed up the process, increase the productivity and the profit. These categories are made to include a set of tools, but each of it has his own set. From all these tools, I believe that the most used are the spreadsheets and the reporting software. Actually, the reporting software is the tool that I use the most often. What do you use the most?
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