BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: (BI)

Business Intelligence (BI) refers to computer-based techniques used in spotting,

digging-out, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or
departments or associated costs and incomes.

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, business performance management, benchmarking,
text mining, and predictive analytics.

Business Intelligence often aims to support better business decision-making. Thus a BI

system can be called a decision support system (DSS). Though the term business
intelligence is often used as 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, is
done by gathering, analyzing and disseminating information with or without support from
technology and applications, and focuses on all-source information and data
(unstructured or structured), mostly external, but also internal to a company, to support
decision making.

HISTORY OF BI:

In a 1958 article, IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn used the term business intelligence.
He defined intelligence as: "the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented
facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal."

In 1989 Howard Dresner (later a Gartner Group analyst) proposed BI as an umbrella term
to describe "concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-
based support systems." It was not until the late 1990s that this usage was widespread.

BI AND DATA WAREHOUSING:

Often BI applications use data gathered from a data warehouse or a data mart. However,
not all data warehouses are used for business intelligence, nor do all business intelligence
applications require a data warehouse.
BI AND BUSINESS ANALYTICS:

Thomas Davenport has argued that business intelligence should be divided into
querying, reporting, OLAP, an "alerts" tool, and business analytics.

CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS OF BI IMPLEMENTATION:

Although there could be many factors that could affect the implementation process of a
BI system, research by Naveen K. Vodapalli shows that the following are the critical
success factors for business intelligence implementation:

1. Business-driven methodology and project management

2. Clear vision and planning
3. Committed management support & sponsorship
4. Data management and quality
5. Mapping solutions to user requirements
6. Performance considerations of the BI system
7. Robust and expandable framework

THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE:

A 2009 Gartner paper predicted these developments in the business intelligence market.

• Because of lack of information, processes, and tools, through 2012, more than 35
percent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful
decisions about significant changes in their business and markets.
• By 2012, business units will control at least 40 percent of the total budget for
business intelligence.
• By 2010, 20 per cent of organizations will have an industry-specific analytic
application delivered via software as a service as a standard component of their
business intelligence portfolio.
• In 2009, collaborative decision making emerged as a new product category that
combines social software with business intelligence platform capabilities.
• By 2012, one-third of analytic applications applied to business processes will be
delivered through coarse-grained application mashups.

ECONOMIC INTELLIGENCE:

This is information concerning the production, distribution, and consumption of

goods and services, as well as labor, finance, taxation, and other aspects of a nation’s
economy or of the international economic system.