The Goal: Practical Information For All.

FOUR ELEMENTS OF A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION

Here are four essential parts to any Business Intelligence Solution should your company be looking to implement one:

Data Source Systems

A business intelligence solution is, in essence, identifying and locating all relevant data within an organization and allowing everyone in the organization to interact with it. It may be structured data stored in relational databases, or unstructured data kept in spreadsheets and other formats. It may be dispersed among departments and functions, or centralized. In many case’s, most of the data originates from its partners and vendors, each of which may use different technologies and terms. Potential problems include redundant data, stored in multiple sources with varying levels of accuracy and completeness.

As a business owner, you may want to meditate on this and make sure you are taking steps to put something in place now if you haven’t already done so. It will pay off in ‘spades’ down the road.

Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW)

A data warehouse is a central repository for organizational data, built to ensure that all data is validated, consistent in its definition, and permanently stored for historical analysis. It solves the problem of redundant and inconsistent data sources, by reconciling all data into “one version of the truth” that you and all your employee’s and BI analysts can draw on. Companies in the process of rolling out an EDW, and currently using an operational data store (ODS) want a more dynamic kind of data repository with the principal goal being centralization of data history.

Extract, Transform, Load Tools (ETL Tools)

Data from diverse sources are “scrubbed”, rendered consistent, and loaded into the EDW by means of an ETL tool.
Before most companies adopt a business intelligence solution, their existing applications had to clean and transform data manually by manipulating complex Excel spreadsheets, wasting countless hours. Implementing ETL applications to automate this work is a major “behind-the-scenes” fix that free’s up the IT staff to work on higher-level functionality like providing new reports for business users.

Reports, Dashboards, Scorecards, and Alerts

From the point of view of most business users, business intelligence is about asking business questions and getting timely answers. There are a number of “interfaces” by which BI can satisfy their needs. Reports can be daily, weekly, monthly, or on-demand documents that provide information in a pre-defined format. Business Intelligence reporting capabilities. They have come a long way from the old days. [Five years ago]  Cognos, for example, can provide more types of reports, faster, with analysis, charts, graphs, and other content that was not possible five years ago.

Cognos [IBM's BI Platform] is one of the top BI solutions on the market, and competes with such brands as SAP’s Business Objects, Oracle’s Business Intelligence, SAS, and MicroStrategy. Cognos distinguishes itself from its competitors by offering a comprehensive package based on open standards, modular deployment, and compatibility with third-party software. **For more information on Cognos, try to find a white paper they put out a few years ago: ‘The full promise of Business Intelligence’.

Dashboards and scorecards represent simple interfaces that allow users to monitor a small set of key performance indicators (KPIs) in near real-time via a computer screen, web page, or mobile device. Alerts are software programs that monitor KPIs and send an e-mail or some other kind of message when a condition is met, such as a KPI falling below acceptable levels.

Logically, the bigger the enterprise the more in-depth BI can get. As a smaller business though, it’s worth looking at what your options are.

If you need more information or have questions, do not hesitate to email me.