1. Definition: Business Intelligence (BI)

What is Business Intelligence (BI)?

Business Intelligence (BI) is a set of processes, applications, and practices, that combines business analytics, data mining, data visualization, and other technologies to convert the raw data into valuable information, which can help organizations decision-makers make a better business decision.
By running BI process, the organisation need to collect data from internal and external sources, prepare them for analyse, run queries of the data and create data visualization, provide the final result as reports to business users, thus driving better business decisions, enabling organizations to increase revenue, improve operational efficiency and gain competitive advantage over business competitors.

Why BI is important?

1. It can use relevant data to help business to improve organisation’s business operation.
2. Effectly using BI tools and techniques of the collected data can be transformed to company about its busines process and strategy of valuable insight.
3. By using BI, it can help organisation apeed up and make better business decision that would increase productivity and income, so as to accelerate business growth and increase profits.
4. BI contributes to data visualization, which improves data quality and thus decision quality, which includes: find a way to increaseorganisationn’s profits; analyse customer behavior; compare organisation’s data with its compeetitors; track performace; optimise the operation; spot market trend; identify issues or problems that need to be addressedz, and so on.
5. BI system can be used not only for enterprises, but also for small and medium-sized enterprises(SME).
6. Analysts can use BI provides benchmark performance and the competition, to make the organization more smooth and efficient operation.

How does BI work?

Operational System
An operational system is a generally known term in data warehousing that specifies a system which is used to maintain records of daily business transactions in an organization. Operational system is also termed as Online Transaction Processing (OLTP). Operational systems have to deal with the running data values and consists of data like payroll, inventory, order and other daily operations data.

ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning
ERP is a kind of software that the organization use it to manage the daily business activities, such as accounting, procurement, project management, risk management and compliance, and supply chain operation. Complete ERP suite also includes enterprise performance management helps organizations to plan, budget, forecast and reporting financial results of the software.

ERP system will be linked in a variety of business process, and make possible the data flow between them. Through the organization’s Shared transactional data collected from multiple sources, the ERP system is to eliminate data repeat, and provides data integrity with a single source of truth.

ERP system is a single, defined data structure (model), the data structure usually has a public database. This helps to ensure that the entire enterprise to use information are standardized, and based on common definitions and user experience. Then, these core structure and across lines of business, such as finance, human resources, engineering, marketing, operation) driven workflow business process, connection system and use their staff relate to each other. In a nutshell, ERP is in the modern enterprise integrated personnel, processes and technology tools.

CRM: Client Relationship Management
CRM is a technology used to manage the company all relationships with customers and potential customers. It aimed at increasing revenue and profitability, reducing costs and increasing customer loyalty. By using the CRM system which can help company to keep in touch with customers, simplify the process and improve the profitability.

The CRM system can bring together all the information from the various departments of a company to provide a comprehensive view of each customer in real time.

This enables customer-facing employees in the areas of sales, marketing, and customer support to make quick and informed decisions from selling up and cross-selling to improving the quality of communication and response with customers, as well as coordinating the management of sales and marketing activities.

Flat Files
Flat file databases store data in plain text. In a relational database, a flat file consists of a table with one record per row. The different columns in the record are separated by commas or tabs to separate the fields. The differenced is flat file databases do not contain multiple tables. The data stored in a flat file has no folder or path associated with it.

Flat files are widely used in data warehouse projects to import data. They do not perform operations on the data they store, but because they are easy to carry data from the server, they are preferred. Flat files are simply a way to store table information without any relationships between the tables contained in them.

A flat database is easier to understand and set up than a traditional database, but it may not be enough if it contains millions of items.

ETL (Extraction Transformation Loading)
ETL technology is used to extract data from the source database, transform and clean the data, and load it into the target database. ETL is an important part of SET data warehouse technology. Its purpose is to integrate the scattered, disordered and non-uniform data to provide an analytical basis for the decision-making of enterprises.

The principal differences between ETL and conventional methods of moving data is its ease-of-use. A user-friendly graphical interface can be used to quickly map tables and columns between the source and target databases.

Date Warehouse
Data warehouse is a data management system used to enable and support business intelligence (BI) activities, especially analytics. It is only used to perform queries and analysis, and usually contains a large amount of historical data. Data in a data warehouse usually comes from a wide range of sources, such as application, log, files and transactional applications.

Data warehouse centralizes and merges large amounts of data from multiple sources. Its analytical capabilities allow organizations to gain valuable business insight from their data to improve decision-making. Over time, it builds a historical record that is invaluable to data scientists and business analysts. Because of these capabilities, a data warehouse can be seen as a “single source of truth” for an organization.

Data Mart
A data mart is a subset of the data in a data warehouse. Data marts are built for specific groups of users. They contain a subset of rows and columns of interest to a particular audience.

A data mart also contains a repository of aggregated data collected for analysis of specific departments or units within an organization, such as a sales department.

By providing decision-makers with a small portion of the data in the data warehouse, privacy, performance, and clarity objectives can be achieved.

Metadata
Metadata is the description of other data in the data warehouse. It provides information about a content. For example, an image might include metadata that describes the size of the image, color depth, image resolution, resolution at the time the image was created, and other data. The metadata of a text document can contain information about the length of the document, who was the author, when the document was written, and a short summary of the document.

Summary Data
Summary data are an important part of creating a high-performance data warehouse, which store data aggregated in a manner that answers common (or resource-intensive) business queries. The summary sheet is all about speed. They are smaller than fact tables, which means they typically respond faster (fewer rows need to be queried), and they provide answers without having to compute every result from scratch.

Raw data
Raw data is the user data in the database, or a terminal user by use of various data storage, are not processed or simplified data, these data may or may not be machine readable form. It constitutes the data of physical existence.

Raw data can exist in many forms, such as text data, image data, audio data, or mixed data.

OLAP Analysis: (Online analytical processing)
OLAP is a fast software technology that shares multidimensional information and addresses online data access and analysis for specific problems. OLAP system is the most important application of data warehouse system. It is specially designed to support complex analysis operation, focusing on decision support for decision makers and senior managers. It can handle complex query processing of large data volume quickly and flexibly according to the requirements of analysts, and provide query results to decision makers in an intuitive and understandable form, so that they can accurately grasp the business status of enterprises (companies), understand the needs of objects and make correct plans. In some countries, many software vendors take the development of the front-end products to make up for the inadequacy of relational database management system support, public application logic unified scattered, the response in a short time of data processing professionals.

Reporting system
Business intelligence reporting, or BI reporting, is the process of gathering data by utilizing different software and tools to extract relevant insights. Ultimately, it provides suggestions and observations about business trends, empowering decision-makers to act.

Data Mining
Data mining, also known as knowledge discovery in database, is the process of analyzing and discovering massive data, which can help companies to solve problems, mitigate risks, and seize new opportunities. Its main feature is to extract, transform, analyze and model a large number of business data in the commercial database to extract the key knowledge to assist the business decision.

What are the different types of business intelligence?

1. Report
   The focus of the report is on preparing documents with basic information. These reports tell the reader what happened in a particular context and often cover the time at the discretion of the report author. Many BI professionals still rely on these standards, and the report has been a part of a long-term business intelligence software.

2. The analysis
Business intelligence tools also include solutions for analysis. These analytics platforms don’t just show companies what’s happening in their environment, they focus on why things are happening. In many cases, the data itself is useless. This information will only be useful if it is properly analyzed and translated into something the company can use. Analysis of BUSINESS intelligence technologies includes:

Visualization tools: Software that creates easy-to-understand visuals and reports raw data that would otherwise be difficult to understand.

Special reports: Give businesses the opportunity to develop software from scratch based on KPIs and specific data queries they need to know.

Spreadsheet analysis: An assessment of the data contained in a spreadsheet to assess or predict the performance of a particular unit or company.

3. Monitoring

Monitoring is also an important part of a business intelligence environment. With many business intelligence solutions, companies can get as close to information as possible or in real time. This provides an interesting snapshot of critical times. The business intelligence system includes monitoring services such as:

Dashboards: A central environment that can contain useful and actionable data metrics. Information may be displayed graphically on the dashboard to make it easier for the reader to understand.

Key Performance Indicators: KPIs in the business environment measure the performance of specific projects or actions, such as return on investment.

Business performance management: These analytical solutions ensure that the goals you set for your organization have been met or that specific results are being delivered.

In addition to data integration, reporting, analysis, and monitoring, some of the more modern iterations in business intelligence systems also move to the next stage of “forecasting” through business analysis (BA). In an age of artificial intelligence and machine learning, this is likely to become more common.

Forecasting allows companies to use trends and information gleaned from business intelligence and analysis to predict what may happen in the coming months or years. However, for this component of the BI domain to be successful, companies must be proficient in data mining and predictive modeling.

Reference:
Tableeau, What us business intelligence? Your guide to BI and Why it matters? available at: https://www.tableau.com/learn/articles/business-intelligence [Accessed on 04/10/20]
OLAP, What is Business Intelligence(BI)? available at: https://olap.com/learn-bi-olap/olap-bi-definitions/business-intelligence/ [Accessed on 04/10/20]
Guru99, What is Business Intelligence? Definition & Example, available at: https://www.guru99.com/business-intelligence-definition-example.html#2 [Accessed on 04/10/20]
Margaret Rouse,Tech Target, Business Intellengence(BI), available at: https://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/definition/business-intelligence-BI [Accessed on: 04/10/20]
Talend, What is Extract, Transform, Load?Definition, Process, and Tools, available at: https://www.talend.com/resources/what-is-etl/ [Accessed on 04/10/2020]