August 2011

Master of Business Administration-MBA Semester III MI0027- Business Intelligence and tools 2 Credits Assignment Set- 1 (30 Marks)

1.

(i) What do you understand by Business Intelligence System? What are the different steps in order to deliver the Business Value through a BI System? A Business Intelligence (BI) System Business Intelligence (BI) is a generic term used to describe leveraging the organizational internal and external data, information for making the best possible business decisions. The field of Business intelligence is very diverse and comprises the tools and technologies used to access and analyze various types of business information. These tools gather and store the data and allow the user to view and analyze the information from a wide variety of dimensions and thereby assist the decision-makers make better business decisions. Thus the Business Intelligence (BI) systems and tools play a vital role as far as organizations are concerned in making improved decisions in the current cut throat competitive scenario. In simple terms, Business Intelligence is an environment in which business users receive reliable, consistent, meaningful and timely information. This data enables the business users conduct analyses that yield overall understanding of how the business has been, how it is now and how it will be in e near future. Also, the BI tools monitor the financial and operational health of the organization through generation of various types of reports, alerts, alarms, key performance indicators and dashboards. Business intelligence tools are a type of application software designed to help in making better business decisions. These tools aid in the analysis and presentation of data in a more meaningful way and so play a key role in the strategic planning process of an organization. They illustrate business intelligence in the areas of market research and segmentation, customer profiling, customer support, profitability, and inventory and distribution analysis to name a few. Various types of BI systems viz. Decision Support Systems, Executive Information Systems (EIS), Multidimensional Analysis software or OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) tools, data mining tools are discussed further. Whatever is the type, the Business Intelligence capabilities of the system is to let its users slice and dice the information om their organization's numerous databases without having to wait for their IT departments to develop complex queries and elicit answers. Although it is possible to build BI systems without the benefit of a data warehouse, most of the systems are an integral part of the user-facing end of the data warehouse in practice. In fact, we can never think of building a data warehouse without BI Systems. That is the reason; sometimes, the words data warehousing and business intelligence are being used interchangeably.

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Figure 1.1 depicts how the data from one end gets transformed to information at the other end for business information

A Business Intelligence (BI) System (ii) List the characteristics of a Data warehouse and analyze how the development of a Data warehouse helps you in managing various functions in your organizations. 2. 3. What do you understand by Data warehouse Meta Data? What is the use of Metadata? How can you manage Metadata? What do you understand by EIS? What are the significances of EIS? Briefly describe the benefits of EIS.

Master of Business Administration-MBA Semester III MI0027-Business Intelligence and tools 2 Credits Assignment Set- 2 (30 Marks) Each question carries 10 marks

August 2011

1. 2.
3.

Describe Data Quality Types and discuss the concepts of TQDM. Explain the Visual Warehouse in detail. What do you understand by OLAP? What are the guidelines for an OLAP system? Briefly discuss the concept of Data Mining.