Business Intelligence
Today's business environment requires a responsiveness that can only be achieved with timely and accurate insight into business conditions. To be successful, businesses need reliable, efficient and easy access to information about their customers, internal finances, and external market conditions. This information is collectively known as Business Intelligence (BI).
The modern ‘information age’ has spawned an increased commitment to standards and the automation of processes. Various supporting technologies have led to vast amounts of data becoming available to a wide range of both commercial and non-commercial activities. These technologies include:
- Data warehousing which involves the set up of repositories to store this data
- Relational Database management systems (RDBMS) which obtain data
- Extract, transform, load (ETL) data tools
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) packages which have increased the speed of collecting the data, and
- Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) reporting technologies which have increased the speed of generating analytical data reports.
Business Intelligence is the art of sifting through large amounts of data, extracting pertinent information and turning that information into knowledge. This allows informed decisions to be made. Given the large volume of data that accumulates in many organisations, it is impossible for humans to detect many of the patterns and trends that exist within that data. Business Intelligence software incorporates the functionality to detect trends by ‘data mining’. This then facilitates data analysis, efficient research of sophisticated data and reporting on sales or performance on an individual, departmental, or company level.
Other applications for Business Intelligence tools include predicting failure in manufacturing processes, scientific data analysis, population census analysis and statistical analysis of research data.
Business Intelligence courses: