The Basics of Business Intelligence
The Basics of Business Intelligence
Definition
Business intelligence can be defined as a collection of approaches for gathering, storing,
analysing and providing access to data that helps users to gain insights and make better fact-
based business decisions. It should be defined wider than just referring to BI software
applications and analytics to incorporate a more strategic approach to better decision-making.
Business Intelligence
Gathering Data
Gathering data is concerned with collecting or accessing data which can then be used to
inform decision making.
Storing Data
Storing Data is concerned with making sure the data is filed and stored in appropriate ways to
ensure it can be found and used for analysis and reporting.
Analysing Data
The next component of BI is analysing the data. Here we take the data that has been gathered
and inspect, transform or model it in order to gain new insights that will support our business
decision making.
Providing Access
In order to support decision making the decision makers need to have access to the data.
Access is needed to perform analysis or to view the results of the analysis.
Business Intelligence should sit within the overall approach to enterprise performance
management and help make companies more 'intelligent' (see also our outline "What is
Performance Management" for more information or the book "The Intelligent Company").
Extensive research by the Advanced Performance Institute has identified that there are five
essential steps to becoming a more intelligent company (see Figure below):
Yahoo Inc. is another intelligent company that used BI effectively to improve their website. The
organization receives many millions of hits to its home page each hour. To test alteration to the
home page they randomly assign one or two hundred thousand users to an experimental group and
have several million other visitors as a control group. By doing so, they can quickly see whether or
not the alterations to the home page leads to the assumed change in the behaviour of the customer.
This in turn allows them to optimize their offerings to enhance revenues and profits.
PRESENTED BY :
KASSRAOUI Mehdi
SENHAJI Kamal
MOUADDEN Nabil