Business Intelligence:
Concepts, Components, Techniques and Benefits
Awasthi Amit
M. Tech.
Computer Science and Engineering, RKDF Institute of Science and Technology, Bhopal,
M.P. India
*Corresponding Author E-mail: am20it2.amit@gmail.com
ABSTRACT:
For companies maintaining direct contact with large
numbers of customers, however, a growing number channel-oriented applications
(e.g. e-commerce support, call center support) create a new data management
challenge: that is effective way of integrating enterprise applications in real
time. To learn from the past and forecast the future, many companies are
adopting Business Intelligence (BI) tools and systems. Companies have
understood the importance of enforcing achievements of the goals defined by
their business strategies through business intelligence concepts. It describes
the insights on the role and requirement of real time BI by examining the business
needs. The paper explores the concepts of BI, its components, emergence of BI,
benefits of BI, factors influencing BI, technology requirements, designing and
implementing business intelligence, and various BI techniques.
Business intelligence (BI) has two basic different
meanings related to the use of the term intelligence. The primary, less
frequently, is the human intelligence capacity applied in business
affairs/activities. Intelligence of Business is a new field of the investigation
of the application of human cognitive faculties and artificial intelligence
technologies to the management and decision support in different business
problems.
The second relates to the intelligence as information
valued for its currency and relevance. It is expert information, knowledge and
technologies efficient in the management of organizational and individual
business. Therefore, in this sense, business intelligence is a broad category
of applications and technologies for gathering, providing access to, and
analyzing data for the purpose of helping enterprise users make better business
decisions. The term implies having a comprehensive knowledge of all of the
factors that affect the business. It is imperative that firms have an in depth
knowledge about factors such as the customers, competitors, business partners,
economic environment, and internal operations to make effective and good
quality business decisions.
Business intelligence enables firms to make these kinds
of decisions.
A specialized field of business intelligence known as
competitive intelligence focuses solely on the external competitive
environment. Information is gathered on the actions of competitors and
decisions are made based on this information. Little if any attention is paid
to gathering internal information.
In modern businesses, increasing standards, automation,
and technologies have led to vast amounts of data becoming available. Data
warehouse technologies have set up repositories to store this data. Improved
Extract, transform, load (ETL) and even recently Enterprise Application
Integration tools have increased the speedy collecting of data. OLAP reporting
technologies have allowed faster generation of new reports which analyze the
data. Business intelligence has now become the art of sifting through large
amounts of data, extracting pertinent information, and turning that information
into knowledge upon which actions can be taken.
The paper explores the concepts of BI, its components,
emergence of BI, benefits of BI, factors influencing BI, technology
requirements, designing and implementing business intelligence, cultural
imperatives, and various BI techniques. The paper would be useful for budding
researchers in the field of BI to understand the basic concepts.
2. BUSINESS
INTELLIGENCE:
Stackowiak et al. (2007) define
Business intelligence as the process of taking large amounts of data, analyzing
that data, and presenting a high-level set of reports that condense the essence
of that data into the basis of business actions, enabling management to make
fundamental daily business decisions. (Cui et al, 2007) view BI as way and
method of improving business performance by providing powerful assists for
executive decision maker to enable them to have actionable information at hand.
BI tools are seen as technology that enables the efficiency of business
operation by providing an increased value to the enterprise information and
hence the way this information is utilized.
Zeng et al. (2006) define
BI as “The process of collection, treatment and diffusion of information that
has an objective, the reduction of uncertainty in the making of all strategic
decisions.” Experts describe Business intelligence as a “business management
term used to describe applications and technologies which are used to gather,
provide access to analyze data and information about an enterprise, in order to
help them make better informed business decisions.”
(Tvrdíková, 2007) describes the basic characteristic for BI
tool is that it is ability to collect data from heterogeneous source, to
possess advance analytical methods, and the ability to support multi users
demands.
Zeng et al. (2006)
categorized BI technology based on the method of information delivery;
reporting, statistical analysis, ad-hoc analysis and predicative analysis.
The
concept of Business Intelligence (BI) is brought up by Gartner Group since
1996. It is defined as the application of a set of methodologies and
technologies, such as J2EE, DOTNET, Web Services, XML, data warehouse, OLAP,
Data Mining, representation technologies, etc, to improve enterprise operation
effectiveness, support management/decision to achieve competitive advantages.
Business Intelligence by today is never a new technology instead of an
integrated solution for companies, within which the business requirement is
definitely the key factor that drives technology innovation. How to identify
and creatively address key business issues is therefore always the major
challenge of a BI application to achieve real business impact.
(Golfarelli et.al, 2004) defined BI that includes effective
data warehouse and also a reactive component capable of monitoring the
time-critical operational processes to allow tactical and operational
decision-makers to tune their actions according to the company strategy. (Gangadharan and Swamy, 2004)
define BI as the result of in-depth analysis of detailed business data,
including database and application technologies, as well as analysis practices.
(Gangadharan and Swamy,
2004) widen the definition of BI as technically much broader tools, that
includes potentially encompassing knowledge management, enterprise resource
planning, decision support systems and data mining.
BI
includes several software for Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL),
data warehousing, database query and reporting, (Berson
et.al, 2002; Curt Hall, 1999) multidimensional/on-line analytical processing
(OLAP) data analysis, data mining and visualization.
3. COMPONENTS OF BI.:
OLAP
(On-line analytical processing): It refers to the
way in which business users can slice and dice their way through data using
sophisticated tools that allow for the navigation of dimensions such as time or
hierarchies. Online Analytical Processing or OLAP provides multidimensional,
summarized views of business data and is used for reporting, analysis, modeling
and planning for optimizing the business. OLAP techniques and tools can be used
to work with data warehouses or data marts designed for sophisticated
enterprise intelligence systems. These systems process queries required to
discover trends and analyze critical factors. Reporting software generates
aggregated views of data to keep the management informed about the state of
their business. Other BI tools are used to store and analyze data, such as data
mining and data warehouses; decision support systems and forecasting; document
warehouses and document management; knowledge management; mapping, information
visualization, and dash boarding; management information systems, geographic
information systems; Trend Analysis; Software as a Service (SaaS).
Advanced
Analytics: it is referred to as data mining,
forecasting or predictive analytics, this takes advantage of statistical
analysis techniques to predict or provide certainty measures on facts.
Corporate
Performance Management (Portals, Scorecards, Dashboards): this general category usually
provides a container for several pieces to plug into so that the aggregate
tells a story. For example, a balanced scorecard that displays portlets for financial metrics combined with say
organizational learning and growth metrics.
Real
time BI: It allows for the real time distribution
of metrics through email, messaging systems and/or interactive displays.
Data
Warehouse and data marts: The data warehouse is the
significant component of business intelligence. It is subject oriented,
integrated. The data warehouse supports the physical propagation of data by
handling the numerous enterprise records for integration, cleansing,
aggregation and query tasks. It can also contain the operational data which can
be defined as an updateable set of integrated data used for enterprise wide
tactical decision-making of a particular subject area. It contains live data,
not snapshots, and retains minimal history. Data sources can be operational
databases, historical data, external data for example, from market research
companies or from the Internet), or information from the already existing data
warehouse environment. The data sources can be relational databases or any
other data structure that supports the line of business applications. They also
can reside on many different platforms and can contain structured information,
such as tables or spreadsheets, or unstructured information, such as plaintext
files or pictures and other multimedia information. A data mart as described by
(Inmon, 1999) is a collection of subject areas
organized for decision support based on the needs of a given department.
Finance has their data mart, marketing has theirs, and sales have theirs and so
on. And the data mart for marketing only faintly resembles anyone else's data
mart. Perhaps most importantly, (Inmon, 1999) the
individual departments own the hardware, software, data and programs that
constitute the data mart. Each department has its own interpretation of what a
data mart should look like and each department's data mart is peculiar to and
specific to its own needs. Similar to data warehouses, data marts contain
operational data that helps business experts to strategize based on analyses of
past trends and experiences. The key difference is that the creation of a data
mart is predicated on a specific, predefined need for a certain grouping and
configuration of select data. There can be multiple data marts inside an
enterprise. A data mart can support a particular business function, business
process or business unit.
A
data mart as described by (Inmon, 1999) is a
collection of subject areas organized for decision support based on the needs
of a given department. Finance has their data mart, marketing has theirs, and
sales have theirs and so on. And the data mart for marketing only faintly
resembles anyone else's data mart.
BI
tools are widely accepted as a new middleware between transactional
applications and decision support applications, thereby decoupling systems
tailored to an efficient handling of business transactions from systems
tailored to an efficient support of business decisions. The capabilities of BI
include decision support, online analytical processing, statistical analysis,
forecasting, and data mining. The following are the major components that constitute
BI.
Data Sources
Data
sources can be operational databases, historical data, external data for
example, from market research companies or from the Internet), or information
from the already existing data warehouse environment. The data sources can be
relational databases or any other data structure that supports the line of
business applications. They also can reside on many different platforms and can
contain structured information, such as tables or spreadsheets, or unstructured
information, such as plaintext files or pictures and other multimedia
information.
4. ISSUES IN BI:
Experts
View: Experts view BI in different ways.
Data warehousing experts view BI as supplementary systems and is very new to
them. These experts treat BI as technology platform for decision support
application. The author is of opinion that to data mining experts BI is set of
advanced decision support systems with data mining techniques and applications
of algorithms. To statisticians BI is viewed as a forecasting and multidimensional
analysis based tool.
Approaches
in Data Warehousing: The main key to successful BI system
is consolidating data from the many different enterprise operational systems
into an enterprise data warehouse. Very few organizations have a full-fledged
enterprise data warehouse. This is due to the vast scope of effort towards
consolidating the entire enterprise data. (Berson
et.al, 2002) emphasizes that in view of emerging highly dynamic business
environment, only the most competitive enterprises will achieve sustained
market success. The organizations will distinguish themselves by the capability
to leverage information about their market place, customers, and operations to
capitalize on the business opportunities.
Analysis
of right information: Several surveys including Gartner,
Forrester and International Data Centre report that most of the firms
throughout the globe are interested in investing in BI. It is to be noted that
despite major investments in enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer
relationship management (CRM) over the last decade businesses are struggling to
achieve competitive advantage. It is due to the information captured by these
systems. Any corporate would look forward for one goal called ‘right access to
information quickly’. Hence, the firms need to support the analysis and
application of information in order to make operational decisions. Say for
marking seasonal merchandise or providing certain recommendations to customers,
firms need right access to information quickly. Implementing smarter business
processes is where business intelligence influences and influences the bottom
line and returns value to any firm.
5. FUTURE OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE:
In this rapidly
changing world consumers are now demanding quicker more efficient service from
businesses. To stay competitive companies must meet or exceed the expectations
of consumers. Companies will have to rely more heavily on their business
intelligence systems to stay ahead of trends and future events. Business intelligence
users are beginning to demand Real time Business Intelligence] or near real
time analysis relating to their business, particularly in frontline operations.
They will come to expect up to date and fresh information in the same fashion
as they monitor stock quotes online. Monthly and even weekly analysis will not
suffice. In the not too distant future companies will become dependent on real
time business information in much the same fashion as people come to expect to
get information on the internet in just one or two clicks.
Also
in the near future business information will become more democratized where end
users from throughout the organization will be able to view information on
their particular segment to see how it's performing.
So,
in the future, the capability requirements of business intelligence will
increase in the same way that consumer expectations increase. It is therefore
imperative that companies increase at the same pace or even faster to stay
competitive.
6. REASONS FOR BUSINESS
INTELLIGENCE:
Business
Intelligence enables organizations to make well informed business decisions and
thus can be the source of competitive advantages. This is especially true when
firms are able to extrapolate information from indicators in the external environment
and make accurate forecasts about future trends or economic conditions. Once
business intelligence is gathered effectively and used proactively then the
firms can make decisions that benefit the firms.
The
ultimate objective of business intelligence is to improve the timeliness and
quality of information. Timely and good quality information is like having a
crystal ball that can give an indication of what's the best course to take.
Business intelligence reveals:
The position of the firm as in
comparison to its competitors
Changes in customer behavior and
spending patterns
The
capabilities of the firm
Market conditions, future trends,
demographic and economic information
The social, regulatory, and political
environment
What the other firms in the market are
doing
Businesses
realize that in this very competitive, fast paced and ever-changing business
environment, a key competitive quantity is how quickly they respond and adapt
to change. Business intelligence enables them to use information gathered to
quickly and constantly respond to changes.
The
Fig.1 presents an understanding of BI. A BI system in other words is a
combination of data warehousing and decision support systems. The figure also
reveals how data from disparate sources can be extracted and stored to be
retrieved for analysis. The basic BI functions and reports are shown in fig 1.
The
primary activities include gathering, preparing and analyzing data. The data
itself must be of high quality. The various sources of data is collected,
transformed, cleansed, loaded and stored in a warehouse. The relevant data is
for a specific business area that is extracted from the data warehouse. A BI organization fully exploits
data at every phase of the BI architecture as it progresses through various
levels of informational metamorphosis. The raw data is born in operational
environments, where transactional data pours in from every source and every
corner of the enterprise. Therefore, that is the business intelligent
organization vision: A natural flow of data, from genesis to action. In
addition, at each step in the flow, the data is fully exploited to ensure the
increase of information value for the enterprise. The challenge for BI, of
course, is to build any organization’s vision.
7. BENEFITS OF BI:
BI
provides many benefits to companies utilizing it. It can eliminate a lot of the
guesswork within an organization, enhance communication among departments while
coordinating activities, and enable companies to respond quickly to changes in
financial conditions, customer preferences, and supply chain operations. BI
improves the overall performance of the company using it.
Fig 1. A basic understanding of BI
Information
is often regarded as the second most important resource a company has (a
company's most valuable assets are its people). So when a company can make
decisions based on timely and accurate information, the company can improve its
performance. BI also expedites decision-making, as acting quickly and correctly
on information before competing businesses do can often result in competitively
superior performance. It can also improve customer experience, allowing for the
timely and appropriate response to customer problems and priorities.
The
firms have recognized the importance of business intelligence for the masses
has arrived. Some of them are listed below.
With BI superior tools, now employees can
also easily convert their business knowledge via the analytical intelligence to
solve many business issues, like increase response rates from direct mail,
telephone, e-mail, and Internet delivered marketing campaigns.
With BI, firms can identify their most
profitable customers and the underlying reasons for those customers’ loyalty,
as well as identify future customers with comparable if not greater potential.
Analyze click-stream data to improve
e-commerce strategies.
Quickly detect warranty-reported problems to
minimize the impact of product design deficiencies.
Discover money-laundering criminal
activities.
Analyze potential growth customer
profitability and reduce risk exposure through more accurate financial credit
scoring of their customers.
Determine what combinations of products and
service lines customers are likely to purchase and when.
Analyze clinical trials for experimental
drugs.
Set more profitable rates for insurance
premiums.
Reduce equipment downtime by applying
predictive maintenance.
Determine with attrition and churn analysis
why customers leave for competitors and/or become the customers.
Detect and deter fraudulent behavior, such
as from usage spikes when credit or phone cards are stolen.
Identify promising new molecular drug
compounds.
Customers
are the most critical aspect to a company's success. Without them a company
cannot exist. So it is very important that firms have information on their
preferences. Firms must quickly adapt to their changing demands. Business
Intelligence enables firms to gather information on the trends in the
marketplace and come up with innovative products or services in anticipation of
customer's changing demands.
Competitors
can be a huge hurdle on firm’s way to success. Their objectives are the same as
firms’ and that is to maximize profits and customer satisfaction. In order to
be successful firms must stay one step ahead of the competitors. In business we
don't want to play the catch up game because we would have lost valuable market
share. Business Intelligence tells what actions our competitors are taking, so
one can make better informed decisions.
8. BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
TECHNOLOGY:
Business
intelligence provides organizational data in such a way that the organizational
knowledge filters can easily associate with this data and turn it into
information for the organization. Persons involved in business intelligence
processes may use application software and other technologies to gather, store,
analyze, and provide access to data, and present that data in a simple, useful
manner. The software aids in Business performance management, and aims to help
people make "better" business decisions by making accurate, current,
and relevant information available to them when they need it. Some businesses
use data warehouses because they are a logical collection of information
gathered from various operational databases for the purpose of creating
business intelligence.
In
order for BI system to work effectively there must be some technical
constraints in place. BI technical requirements have to address the following
issues:
Security and specified user access to the
warehouse
Data volume (capacity)
How long data will be stored (data
retention)
Benchmark and performance targets
People
working in business intelligence have developed tools that ease the work,
especially when the intelligence task involves gathering and analyzing large
quantities of unstructured data. Each vendor typically defines Business
Intelligence their own way, and markets tools to do BI the way that they see
it.
Business
intelligence includes tools in various categories, including the following:
AQL - Associative Query Logic
Scorecarding
Business Performance Management and
Performance Measurement
Business Planning
Business Process Re-engineering
Competitive Analysis
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and
Marketing
Data mining (DM), Data Farming, and Data
warehouses
Decision Support Systems (DSS) and
Forecasting
Document warehouses and Document Management
Enterprise Management systems
Executive Information Systems (EIS)
Finance and Budgeting
Human Resources
Knowledge Management
Mapping, Information visualization, and Dash
boarding
Management Information Systems (MIS)
Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) and
multidimensional analysis; sometimes simply called "Analytics" (based
on the so-called "hypercube" or "cube")
Real time business intelligence
Statistics and Technical Data Analysis
Supply Chain Management/Demand Chain
Management
Systems intelligence
Trend Analysis
User/End-user Query and Reporting
Web Personalization and Web Mining
Text mining
BI
often uses Key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess the present state of
business and to prescribe a course of action. More and more organizations have
started to make more data available more promptly. In the past, data only
became available after a month or two, which did not help managers to adjust
activities in time to hit Wall Street targets. Recently, banks have tried to
make data available at shorter intervals and have reduced delays.
For
example, for businesses which have higher operational/credit risk loading (for
example, credit cards and "wealth management"), a large
multi-national bank makes KPI-related data available weekly, and sometimes
offers a daily analysis of numbers. This means data usually becomes available
within 24 hours, necessitating automation and the use of IT systems.
9. DESIGNING AND
IMPLEMENTING A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE:
When
implementing a BI programme one might like to pose a
number of questions and take a number of resultant decisions, such as:
Goal Alignment queries: The first step
determines the short and medium-term purposes of the programme.
What strategic goal(s) of the organization will the programme
address? What organizational mission/vision does it relate to? A crafted
hypothesis needs to detail how this initiative will eventually improve results
/ performance (i.e. a strategy map).
Baseline queries: Current
information-gathering competency needs assessing. Does the organization have
the capability of monitoring important sources of information? What data does
the organization collect and how does it store that data? What are the
statistical parameters of this data, e.g. how much random variation does it
contain? Does the organization measure this?
Cost and risk queries: The financial
consequences of a new BI initiative should be estimated. It is necessary to
assess the cost of the present operations and the increase in costs associated
with the BI initiative? What is the risk that the initiative will fail? This risk
assessment should be converted into a financial metric and included in the
planning.
Customer and Stakeholder queries: Determine
who will benefit from the initiative and who will pay. Who has a stake in the
current procedure? What kinds of customers/stakeholders will benefit directly
from this initiative? Who will benefit indirectly? What are the quantitative /
qualitative benefits? Is the specified initiative the best way to increase
satisfaction for all kinds of customers, or is there a better way? How will
customers' benefits be monitored? What about employees, shareholders,...
distribution channel members?
Metrics-related queries: These information
requirements must be operationalized into clearly
defined metrics. One must decide what metrics to use for each piece of
information being gathered. Are these the best metrics? How do we know that?
How many metrics need to be tracked? If this is a large number (it usually is),
what kind of system can be used to track them? Are the metrics standardized, so
they can be benchmarked against performance in other organizations? What are
the industry standard metrics available?
Measurement
Methodology-related queries: One should establish a methodology or a procedure
to determine the best (or acceptable) way of measuring the required metrics.
What methods will be used, and how frequently will the organization collect
data? Do industry standards exist for this? Is this the best way to do the
measurements? How do we know that?
Results-related queries: Someone should
monitor the BI programme to ensure that objectives
are being met. Adjustments in the programme may be
necessary. The programme should be tested for
accuracy, reliability, and validity. How can one demonstrate that the BI
initiative (rather than other factors) contributed to a change in results? How
much of the change was probably random?.
10. DISCUSSION:
Any
new-form organization now a days experience is the
value chain, which is set of primary secondary activities that create value for
customers. (Denison, 1997) examines several critical activities related to
value chain. Without effective BI to target process-oriented organizations for
supporting, this is not possible. (Davenport, 1993) describes various issues on
re-engineering in business process innovation.
According
to (Adelman et.al, 2002), BI is a term that encompasses a broad range of
analytical software and solutions for gathering, consolidating, analyzing and
providing access to information in a way that is supposed to let an
enterprise's users make better business decisions. (Malhotra,
2000) describes BI that facilitates the connections in the new-form
organization, bringing real-time information to centralized repositories and
support analytics that can be exploited at every horizontal and vertical level
within and outside the firm. BI describes the result of in-depth analysis of
detailed business data, including database and application technologies, as
well as analysis practices (Gangadharan and Swamy, 2004). BI is technically much broader, potentially
encompassing knowledge management, enterprise resource planning, decision
support systems and data mining (Gangadharan and Swamy, 2004).
(Nguyen
Manh et.al, 2005) introduced an enhanced BI
architecture that covers the complete process to sense, interpret, predict,
automate and respond to business environments and thereby aims to decrease the
reaction time needed for business decisions. (Nguyen Manh
et.al, 2005) proposed an event-driven IT infrastructure to operate BI
applications which enable real-time analytics across corporate business
processes, notifies the business of actionable recommendations or automatically
triggers business operations, and effectively closing the gap between Business
Intelligence systems and business processes.
(Seufert Andhreas and Schiefer Josef, 2005) suggest an architecture for enhanced
Business Intelligence that aims to increase the value of Business Intelligence
by reducing action time and interlinking business processes into decision
making.
Businesses
no longer want what has happened but they want to know the underlying reasons.
Rather than knowing how many blankets were sold in December, businesses want to
understand how many were sold in china during a storm. BI provides unified
integrated view of business activities. A retailer knows how many blankets were
sold in December across India and therefore make better purchasing and stock
management decision for the upcoming year.
Enterprises
are building business intelligence systems that support business analysis and
decision making to help them better understand their operations and (Gangadharan and Swamy, 2004)
compete in the marketplace.
Innovation
in data storage technology is now significantly outpacing progress in computer
processing power, heralding a new era for real-time BI. As a result, some
software vendors with superior tools offer a complete suite of analytic BI
applications, tools and data models that enable organizations to tap into the
virtual treasure trove of information. The tools provide easy access to
corporate and enterprise wide data and convert that data into useful and
actionable information that is consistent across the organization—one coherent
version of the truth.
Companies
still fee that BI has technology related complexities and usable only by
technically savvy specialists. They also feel that BI is expensive. BI takes a
long time to yield correct analysis. The firms want these analyses in real time
for short-term projects. The tradition BI may not do this but a real time BI
environment certainly comes into rescue. Data is finally treated as the
corporate resource in a new discipline. Any operational system (including ERP
and CRM) and any decision support application (including data warehouses and
data marts) are BI, if and only if they were developed under the
umbrella and methodology of a strategic cross-organizational initiative (Gangadharan and Swamy, 2004).
Traditional
BI systems consist of a back-end database, a front-end user interface, software
that processes the information to produce the business intelligence itself, and
a reporting system. The capabilities of BI include decision support, online
analytical processing, statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining.
Several
varied sectors like manufacturers, electronic commence businesses,
telecommunication providers, airlines, retailers, health systems, financial
services, bioinformatics and hotels use BI for customer support, market
research, segmenting, product profitability, inventory and distribution
analysis, statistical analysis, multi dimensional reports, detecting fraud
detection etc.
Business
Intelligence and data mining is a field that is heavily influenced by
traditional statistical techniques, and most data-mining methods will reveal a
strong foundation of statistical and data analysis methods. Some of the
traditional data-mining techniques include classification, clustering, outlier
analysis, sequential patterns, time series analysis, prediction, regression,
link analysis (associations), and multidimensional methods including online
analytical processing (OLAP). These can then be categorized into a series of
data-mining techniques, which are classified and illustrated in Table 1 (Goebel
and Le Grunwald, 1999).
Table
1: Current BI Techniques
TECHNIQUE |
DESCRIPTION |
|
Predictive modeling |
Predict value for a specific data item
attribute |
|
Characterization and descriptive data
mining |
Data distribution, dispersion and
exception |
|
Association, correlation, causality analysis (Link Analysis) |
Identify relationships between attributes |
|
Classification |
Determine to which class a data item
belongs |
|
Clustering and outlier analysis |
Partition a set into classes, whereby
items with similar characteristics are grouped together |
|
Temporal and sequential patterns analysis |
Trend and deviation, sequential patterns,
periodicity |
|
OLAP (OnLine
Analytical Processing) |
OLAP tools enable users to analyze
different dimensions of multidimensional data. For example, it provides time
series and trend analysis views. |
|
Model Visualization |
Making discovered knowledge easily
understood using charts, plots, histograms, and other
visual means |
|
Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) |
Explores
a data set
without a strong
dependence on |
In addition, the entire
broad field of data mining includes not only a discussion of statistical
techniques, but also various related technologies and techniques, including
data warehousing, and many software packages and languages that have been
developed for the purpose of mining data. Some of these packages and languages include:
DBMiner, IBM Intelligent Miner, SAS Enterprise Miner,
SGI MineSet, Clementine, MS/SQLServer
2000, DBMiner, BlueMartini,
MineIt, DigiMine, and MS
OLEDB for Data Mining (Goebel and Le Grunwald, 1999).
11.CONCLUSION:
Powerful
transaction-oriented information systems are now commonplace in every major
industry, effectively leveling the playing field for corporations around the
world. To remain competitive, however, now requires analytically oriented
systems that can revolutionize a company’s ability to rediscover and utilize
information they already own. The business intelligence (BI) has evolved over
the past decade to rely increasingly on real time data. The BI systems
auto-initiate actions to systems based on rules and context to support several
business processes. These analytical systems derive insight from the wealth of
data available, delivering information that’s conclusive, fact-based, and
actionable. Enterprises today demand quick results. It is becoming essential
nowadays that not only is the business analysis done, but also actions in
response to analysis of results can be performed and instantaneously changes
parameters of business processes. The paper explored the concepts of BI, its
components, benefits of BI, technology requirements, designing and implementing
business intelligence, and various BI techniques.
12. REFERENCES:
1.
Adelman
Sid, Moss Larissa and Barbusinski Les. (2002) “I
found several definitions of BI’, DM Review. Retrieved 17 August 2002 from
2.
Cui,
Z., Damiani, E. and Leida,
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Received on 18.08.2012 Modified on 02.09.2012
Accepted on 09.09.2012 © A&V Publication all right reserved
Asian J. Management 3(4): Oct.-Dec., 2012
page 196-203