business intelligence

BUSINESSS INTELLIGENCE

Business intelligence (BI) is a set of theories, methodologies, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information for business purposes. BI can handle enormous amounts of unstructured data to help identify, develop and otherwise create new opportunities. BI, in simple words, makes interpreting voluminous data friendly. Making use of new opportunities and implementing an effective strategy can provide a competitive market advantage and long-term stability.

Generally, Business Intelligence is made up of an increasing number of components, these are:

·       Multidimensional aggregation and allocation

·       Denormalization, tagging and standardization

·       Realtime reporting with analytical alert

·       Interface with unstructured data source

·       Group consolidation, budgeting and rolling forecast

·       Statistical inference and probabilistic simulation

·       Key performance indicators optimization

·       Version control and process management

·       Open item management

BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics.

Though the term business intelligence is sometimes a synonym for competitive intelligence (because they both support decision making), BI uses technologies, processes, and applications to analyze mostly internal, structured data and business processes while competitive intelligence gathers, analyzes and disseminates information with a topical focus on company competitors. If understood broadly, business intelligence can include the subset of competitive intelligence.

Business intelligence and data warehousing

Often BI applications use data gathered from a data warehouse or a data mart. A data warehouse is a copy of analytical data that facilitates decision support. However, not all data warehouses are used for business intelligence, nor do all business intelligence applications require a data warehouse.

To distinguish between the concepts of business intelligence and data warehouses, Forrester Research often defines business intelligence in one of two ways:

Using a broad definition: "Business Intelligence is a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information used to enable more effective strategic, tactical, and operational insights and decision-making." When using this definition, business intelligence also includes technologies such as data integration, data quality, data warehousing, master data management, text and content analytics, and many others that the market sometimes lumps into the Information Management segment. Therefore, Forrester refers to data preparation and data usage as two separate, but closely linked segments of the business intelligence architectural stack.

Forrester defines the latter, narrower business intelligence market as, "...referring to just the top layers of the BI architectural stack such as reporting, analytics and dashboards

Sumber : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_intelligence