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  • Essay / Business Intelligence (bi)

    Table of contentsLiterature reviewData and data sourcesExtract, transform, load (ETL)Data warehouse and data martsAdvanced analyticsDiscussionConclusions and future study"In the early 1990s, Howard Dresner, then an analyst at the group Gartner, coined the term business intelligence due to the growing need for applications designed to support decision-making based on collected data Today, business leaders and senior executives have access to more data than ever before. previously, but data alone does not generate insights (BI) tools have become the go-to resource to help businesses harness the power of Big Data and analytics and make smarter, more informed decisions. Over the years, there have been various definitions of BI depending on its form, its use and the industry to which they apply. Many of them only focus on software used for business intelligence and neglect to include the main purpose of business intelligence. Although the term is often used in relation to software companies, BI is not limited to simple software tools. Say no to plagiarism. Get a Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the Original EssayLiterature ReviewBusiness intelligence has only become a popular term in the business and information technology communities ( IT) than in the 1990s. Business Intelligence (BI) refers to a management philosophy and tool used to help organizations manage and refine business information with the goal of making more effective business decisions (Ghoshal and Kim, 1986; Dresner (1988) defined business intelligence as “the concepts and methods for improving business decision making using fact-based support systems.” The term BI can be used either to refer to relevant information and knowledge describing the business environment, the organization itself and its situation in relation to its markets, customers, competitors and economic issues, or to an organized and systematic process by in which organizations acquire, analyze and disseminate information from internal and external information sources important for their business activities and for decision-making (Lönnqvist and Pirttimäki, 2006). In European literature, the term BI is considered a broad umbrella concept for competitive intelligence (CI) and other intelligence-related terms, such as business intelligence, customer intelligence, competitive intelligence, business intelligence and technical monitoring. Indeed, the term has been defined from several perspectives (Casado, 2004), but they all focus on a common goal, the analysis of data and information. As stated by Gilad and Gilad (1986), organizations have been collecting information about their competitors since the dawn of the modern era. capitalism. The real revolution lies in efforts to institutionalize intelligence activities. BI presents business information in a timely and easy-to-use manner and provides the ability to reason and understand the meaning of business information through, for example, discovery, analysis and ad hoc queries (Azoff and Charlesworth, 2004). Today, business intelligence is defined by Evelson and Nicolson (2008) at Forrester as “a set of methodologies, processes, architectures and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information used to enable business intelligence.more effective strategic, tactical and operational information. decision-making." Today, Business Intelligence is never a new technology but rather an integrated solution for businesses, within which business requirements are undoubtedly the key factor that drives technological innovation (Ranjan , 2009) Ranjan (2009) stated that the major challenge of a BI application To achieve true business impact is to creatively identify and solve key business problems After discussing the many definitions of BI, the. The question of why businesses use it naturally arises. The main goal is to stay ahead of the competition and make the right decision at the right time. These decisions can be made regarding just about every aspect of the business. managing a business, such as determining how to increase the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, deciding if and when to enter new markets, and improving products and services to better meet customer needs. One of the key aspects of business intelligence is that it is designed to put information in the hands of business users. Organizations must make decisions at an increasingly rapid pace. That's why today's business intelligence tools help decision-makers access the information they need without having to do so. first go through the IT department or specifically designated data scientists. BI includes several software programs for multidimensional extraction, transformation and loading (ETL), data warehousing, database querying and reporting (Berson et.al, 2002; Curt Hall, 1999). on-data analysis by online analytical processing (OLAP), data mining and visualization. Data and data sources Business intelligence starts with data. As mentioned in the introduction, businesses have access to more data than ever. Data sources can be operational databases, historical data, external data (from market research companies or the Internet), or information from the already existing data warehouse environment. Data sources can be relational databases or any other data structure supporting the business application sector. They can also reside on many different platforms and contain structured information, such as tables or spreadsheets, or unstructured information, such as plain text files or images and other multimedia information. Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) A key element of BI is the tools and processes used to prepare data for analysis. When data is created by different applications, it is likely not all in the same format, and data from one application cannot necessarily be examined against data from another. Additionally, if business intelligence is relied upon to make critical decisions, businesses must ensure that the data they use is accurate. The process of preparing data for analysis is known as extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL). Data is extracted from internal and external sources, transformed into a common format and loaded into a data warehouse. This process also typically includes data integrity checks to ensure that the data used is accurate and consistent. Data Warehouse and Data Marts The data warehouse is an important element of business intelligence. It is subject-oriented, integrated. The ETL process ends with loading the data intothe warehouse, because when data is contained in separate sources, it is not very useful for intelligence. A data warehouse is a repository containing information from all of the company's applications and systems, as well as external sources, so that they can be analyzed together. A data mart as described by (Inmon, 1999) is a set of domains organized for decision support according to the needs of a given service. Similar to data warehouses, data marts contain operational data that helps business experts develop strategies based on trend analyzes and past experiences. The main difference is that the creation of a data mart is based on a specific and predefined need for a certain grouping and configuration of selected data. There can be several data marts within a company. A data mart can support a particular business function, business process, or business unit. OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) refers to how business users can work their way through data using sophisticated tools that navigate dimensions such as time or hierarchies. Online analytical processing or OLAP provides multidimensional and summarized views of business data and is used for reporting, analysis, modeling and planning to optimize the business. OLAP techniques and tools can be used to work with data warehouses or data marts designed for sophisticated business intelligence systems. Advanced Analytics Called data mining, forecasting, or predictive analytics, they leverage statistical analysis techniques to predict or provide measures of certainty about the facts. Enterprise Performance Management (Portals, Dashboards, and Dashboards) This general category typically provides a container in which multiple elements can be connected so that the aggregate tells a story. Real-Time BI It enables real-time distribution of metrics via email, messaging systems and/or interactive displays. Discussion Overall, Business Intelligence offers benefits to businesses using it. First, BI reduces IT infrastructure costs by eliminating redundant data extraction processes and duplicate data housed in independent data marts across the enterprise. For example, 3M justified its multimillion-dollar data warehouse platform based on savings from data mart consolidation (Watson, Wixom, & Goodhue, 2004, pp. 202-216). Additionally, it can eliminate much of the uncertainty within an organization, improve communication between departments while coordinating activities, and enable businesses to respond quickly to changes in financial conditions, customer preferences, and operations. supply chain. Over time, organizations ask questions like “Why did this happen?” » and even “What will happen?” As business users learn to perform analysis and forecasting, the level of benefits becomes more global and difficult to quantify (Watson and Wixom, 2007). Information is often considered the second most important resource a company has (a company's most valuable assets are its people). So, when a business can make decisions based on timely and accurate information, it can improve its performance. However, there are also some problems regarding the.