UNIT I

Introduction

Business Intelligence Introduction, BI Cycle, BI Architecture, Opportunities, Benefits of BI.

Role of Mathematical model, Factors Responsible for successful BI Project, Obstacle to Business
Intelligence in an Organization.

Business Intelligence Introduction:

Business Intelligence (BI) is a set of ideas, methodologies, processes, architectures, and
technologies that change raw data into significant and useful data for business purpose. Business
Intelligence can handle large amounts of data to help identify and evolve new opportunities for
the business. Making use of these new opportunities and applying a productive scheme on it can
provide a comparable market benefit and long-term stability.

Meaning of Business Intelligence:

BI (Business Intelligence) refers to set of techniques which assist in spotting, digging out and
investigating best data from the large amount of data to improve conclusion making.

What is the Business Intelligence Cycle?

In order to gather, integrate, analyze, and present data in a way that helps corporate decision-
making, business intelligence (BI) also entails the use of technology, tools, and methodologies.
Data warehouses or data marts are frequently used to store and manage the data in BI, which
includes a variety of activities like data mining, reporting, dashboards, and visualizations. By
offering insights into operations, clients, and markets, business intelligence (BI) ultimately
aims to assist organizations in making more educated and data-driven decisions. Businesses
can use BI to find growth possibilities, streamline processes, and enhance overall performance.

Business Intelligence is the process of analyzing unprocessed data and turning it into
knowledge that the company can use to make decisions. Organizations can better understand
their marketing strategies, earnings and losses, effective development and management, and
market trends and consumer behavior by using business intelligence.

Phases of Business Intelligence Life Cycle

Phase 1: Analyze Business Requirements
The first step in the Business Intelligence life cycle is to analyze the business requirements.
The user identifies the business requirements in order to determine the type of analysis that the
user then needs to perform. Identifying the requirements, let the user decides the further action
to be performed.
For example, any retail company can analyze the sales data to figure out the products that are
top-selling and the products that least sell.
Phase 2: Design Data Model
Once the requirements are identified the user needs to design the logical model according to
the requirements. This logical model helps the user to analyze the relationships that exist
within the data entities.
For example, For any retail company, the data model consists of products, their customers, and
the sales data
Phase 3: Design the Physical Schema
Once the logical model is prepared the next step is to design the physical schema using the data
model. The physical schema describes the structure and the content of the data warehouse.
For example, in any retail company, physical schema consists of sales-related facts, product-
customer relationships, and the sales transactions
Phase 4: Build the Data Warehouse
Once the logical and physical schema is designed, the next step is to build the data warehouse.
The design of a data warehouse depends on the physical and logical schema. After the design
of the data warehouse, the data and the content from the source system are loaded into the data
warehouse for further steps.
For example, for the retail system, designing the data warehouse consists of developing a
database that would store the details of customers, products, and other requirements for the
business.
Phase 5: Create the Project Structure (Metadata)
The next step after designing the data warehouse is to create a project structure also known as
metadata. With the help of this created project structure, the mapping of the tables and data in
the data warehouse is easier. Creating the project structure describes the further steps and types
that need to be implemented.
For example, The project structure of the retail company consists of the attributes of the data,
the design, and the working flow of the system. This project structure or metadata gives a brief
idea about the working of the system.
Phase 6: Develop The BI Objects
The next step is to develop the BI objects such as metrics, attributes, dashboards, reports, and
facts. This step consists of developing the reports and dashboards that can be used to analyze
the data in the data warehouse.
For example, the retail company can develop reports and statistics charts that can describe the
profit and loss margins.
Phase 7: Administer and Maintain the Project
The last step is to administer and maintain the project continuously as it undergoes changes.
The project needs to be monitored to maintain the changes, security, and performance of the
system.
For example, the retail company needs to monitor the reports and statistics accordingly to
increase the profit of the sales.

Conclusion

Business Intelligence provides the proper approach for the data analysis and decision-making
process. It helps the business to achieve goals and gain profits. The overall phases of business
intelligence make the further development and maintenance process easy.

What is business intelligence architecture (BI architecture)?

A business intelligence architecture is a framework for the various technologies an organization

deploys to run business intelligence and analytics applications. It includes the IT systems and
software tools that are used to collect, integrate, store and analyze BI data and then present
information on business operations and trends to corporate executives and other business users.

The underlying BI architecture is a key element in the execution of a successful business

intelligence program that uses data analysis and reporting to help an organization track business
performance, optimize business processes, identify new revenue opportunities, improve strategic
planning and make more informed business decisions.

Benefits of BI architecture

In the absence of a BI architecture, businesses and enterprises are at risk of making costly errors
while striving to optimize their data utilization.
A well-articulated BI framework can offer organizations the following key benefits:

 Technology benchmarks. A BI architecture articulates the technology standards and data

management and business analytics practices that support an organization's BI efforts, as
well as the specific platforms and tools deployed.

 Improved decision-making. Enterprises benefit from an effective BI architecture by

using the insights generated by business intelligence tools to make data-driven decisions
that help increase revenue and profits.

 Technology blueprint. A BI framework serves as a technology blueprint for collecting,

organizing and managing BI data and then making the data available for analysis, data
visualization and reporting. A strong BI architecture automates reporting and
incorporates policies to govern the use of the technology components.

 Enhanced coordination. Putting such a framework in place enables a BI team to work in

a coordinated and disciplined way to build an enterprise BI program that meets the
organization's data analytics needs. The BI architecture also helps BI and data managers
create an efficient process for handling and managing the business data that's pulled into
the environment.

 Time savings. By automating the process of collecting and analyzing data, BI helps
organizations save time on manual and repetitive tasks, freeing up their teams to focus on
more high-value projects.

 Scalability. An effective BI infrastructure is easily scalable, enabling businesses to

change and expand as necessary.

 Improved customer service. Business intelligence enhances customer understanding

and service delivery by helping track customer satisfaction and facilitate timely
improvements. For example, an e-commerce store can use BI to track order delivery
times and optimize shipping for better customer satisfaction.
To ensure their needs are met, C-level executives, business managers and other users who rely
on data analysis to formulate strategies and guide their decision-making should have a stake in
creating the architecture.

Business intelligence architecture components and diagram

A BI architecture can be deployed in an on-premises data center or in the cloud. In either case, it
contains a set of core components that collectively support the different stages of the BI process
from data collection, integration, data storage and analysis to data visualization, information
delivery and the use of BI data in business decision-making.
The core components of a BI architecture include the following:
Source systems. These are all of the systems that capture and hold the transactional and
operational data identified as essential for the enterprise BI program. For example, this can
include enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, flat files, application
programming interfaces, finance, manufacturing and supply chain management systems as well
as secondary sources, such as market data and customer databases from outside information
providers. As a result, both internal and external data sources are often incorporated into a BI
architecture.

Important criteria in the data source selection process include data relevancy, data currency, data
quality and the level of detail in the available data sets. In addition, a combination of
structured, semi-structured and unstructured data types might be required to meet the data
analysis and decision-making needs of executives and other end users.

Data integration and cleansing tools. To effectively analyze the collected data for a BI
program, an organization must integrate and consolidate different data sets to create unified
views of them. The most widely used data integration technology for BI applications is extract,
transform and load (ETL) software, which pulls data from source systems in batch processes. A
variant of ETL is extract, load and transform, a technology in which data is extracted and loaded
as-is and transformed later for specific BI uses. Other methods include real-time data integration,
such as change data capture and streaming integration to support real-time analytics applications,
and data virtualization, which combines data from different source systems virtually.

A BI architecture typically also includes data profiling and data cleansing tools that are used to
identify and fix data quality issues. They help BI and data management teams provide clean,
consistent data that's suitable for BI uses.

Analytics data stores. This encompasses the various repositories where BI data is stored and
managed. The primary repository is a data warehouse, which usually stores structured data in a
relational, columnar or multidimensional database and makes it available for querying and
analysis. An enterprise data warehouse can also be tied to smaller data marts set up for individual
departments and business units with data that's specific to their BI needs.
In addition, BI architectures often include an operational data store (ODS) that's an interim
repository for data before it goes into a data warehouse. An ODS can also be used to run
analytical queries against recent transaction data. Depending on the size of a BI environment, a
data warehouse, data mart and an ODS can be deployed on a single database server or separate
business intelligence systems.

A data lake running on a Hadoop cluster or other big data platform can also be incorporated into
a BI architecture as a repository for raw data of various types. The data can be analyzed in the
data lake itself or filtered and loaded into a data warehouse for analysis. A well-planned
architecture should specify which of the different data stores is best suited for particular BI uses.

BI and data visualization tools. The tools used to analyze data and present information to
business users include a suite of technologies that can be built into a BI architecture -- for
example, ad hoc query, data mining and online analytical processing software. In addition, the
growing adoption of self-service BI tools enables business analysts and managers to run queries
themselves instead of relying on the members of the BI team to do that for them.

BI software also includes data visualization tools that can be used to create graphical
representations of data in the form of charts, graphs and other types of visualizations designed to
illustrate trends, patterns and outlier elements in data sets.

Dashboards, portals and reports. These information delivery tools give users visibility into the
results of BI and analytics applications with built-in data visualizations and, often, self-service
capabilities to do additional data analysis. For example, BI dashboards and online portals can be
designed to provide real-time data access with configurable views and give users the ability to
drill down into data. Reports tend to present data in a more static format.

Other components that increasingly are part of a business architecture include data
preparation software used to structure and organize data for analysis and a metadata repository, a
business glossary and a data catalog, which can help users find relevant data and understand its
lineage and meaning.

BI architecture tools

BI architecture tools facilitate the centralization of data collection as well as data analysis and
visualization. These tools play an integral role in empowering businesses to make informed
decisions and extract insights from extensive data sets.

Some examples of BI tools on the market include the following:

1. Datapine. Datapine lets users access, view, analyze and share their company data on a single
analytics platform. Users can perform data analysis, create interactive business dashboards
and obtain new business insights through a simple drag-and-drop interface.

2. Domo. The Domo cloud-based platform unifies data, systems and people for seamless
business operations. It provides enterprise tools for data aggregation, analytics, dashboards
and reporting for organizations looking to maximize data value.

3. Dundas BI. This enterprise-level BI tool lets users create and customize interactive
dashboards and reports. The software can either act as a central data hub or integrate into
existing websites for customized BI capabilities.

4. GoodData. As part of the GoodData platform, this tool offers an enterprise-level option for
data analytics and business intelligence. It helps users analyze data coming from multiple
sources and create reports.

5. Infor Birst. Infor Birst is a cloud-based platform that uses a networked approach and
modern enterprise-class architecture with a focus on multi-tenancy. Birst ensures that a
company's data remains connected by centralizing both decentralized and centralized data.

6. Microsoft Power BI. Users can run analytics either in the cloud or in a reporting server. The
tool comes with built-in artificial intelligence features and offers end-to-end encryption
features.
7. Oracle Business Intelligence. This integrated set of tools lets users gather, store, analyze
and report data for smart decision-making. In addition, it includes a scalable BI server,
dashboards, a content library, web-based reporting and analytics tools.

8. SAS Business Intelligence. This collection of tools lets corporate users conduct self-service
analytics. Its two components -- Enterprise Business Intelligence and Business Visualization
-- provide interactive visualizations and analytics to aid with data analysis and decision-
making.

9. Tableau. In addition to data visualization features, this tool offers live visual analytics and
supports most databases and numerous data sources.

10. Zoho Analytics. This self-service BI and data analytics software lets users analyze data,
generate data visualizations and uncover insights quickly and easily. This tool is accessible to
both small and large-sized organizations.

The Benefits of Business Inte lligence for Business

The list of the benefits of business intelligence can go on. Here are a couple of key benefits of
Business Intelligence that can help companies improve business performance:

1. Fast and accurate reporting: Due to the time-consuming and labor intensive nature of
business reporting, multimodal tools impact businesses. Employees will be able to
monitor KPIs by using tools like templates or custom reports. Besides, there are a variety
of data sources, including financial and operational data.
2. Significant business Insights: If there has to be a combination of actions in the business
world, nothing better than to put together business data and its analysis. All with the
purpose of allowing organizations to come up with better business decisions. These
decisions are led by improved business processes. This will allow valuable business
insights and information fundamental for the company.
3. Competitive analysis: Business Intelligence are the tools, software and systems of a
business. They are key and essential to an organization’s strategic planning process. Also,
there is competitive intelligence. This refers to analyzing a company’s industry and its
competition with the purpose to make strategic business decisions that will help
differentiate the company from other market representatives.
 4. Better BI data quality: Data analysis is the base of BI, so, the organization will not only
collect, but will also analyze data. So, its quality about BI, is a measurement that
evaluates the accuracy and reliability of the data in an organization. It also determines the
completeness and the usability of the analyzed data. Thus, one of the many other benefits
of Business Intelligence is that it will improve the quality of the data.
5. Higher Margins: Thanks to BI, businesses can lower their production costs and identify
opportunities in demand that offer them higher margins, thus improving their ROI
significantly.
6. Improved business performance: BI helps identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and
areas for improvement within a business. By analyzing data and generating reports, BI
enables organizations to optimize processes, enhance productivity, and increase overall
performance. It helps identify opportunities for cost reduction, revenue growth, and
competitive advantages.
7. Risk mitigation and fraud detection: BI can assist organizations in identifying potential
risks and detecting fraudulent activities. By analyzing data patterns and anomalies, BI
systems can flag suspicious transactions, detect fraud attempts, and enhance security
measures. It helps in mitigating risks, protecting assets, and ensuring compliance with
regulations.
8. Efficient reporting and data visualization: BI tools provide intuitive and user-friendly
interfaces for reporting and data visualization. This enables stakeholders to access
relevant information in a visually appealing and easily understandable format. Reports
and dashboards can be customized, allowing users to explore data, track KPIs, and gain
actionable insights effortlessly.
9. Collaboration and data-driven culture: BI promotes a culture of data-driven decision
making and collaboration within organizations. By providing a centralized platform for
data sharing, collaboration, and knowledge exchange, BI fosters cross-functional
teamwork and enables employees to work with a common set of accurate and consistent
data.
10. Scalability and adaptability: BI solutions are designed to handle large volumes of data
and can scale as business needs grow. They can integrate with various data sources,
including internal databases, external systems, and cloud platforms. BI tools are
adaptable and can accommodate evolving business requirements and technological
advancements.

Oppurtunity:

The three most interesting areas of opportunity to capitalize on business intelligence are:
1. Know your customer: Digital transformation offers a solid platform of applications that make it
possible to collect information on our customers. A well-designed digital platform unlocks a
continuous channel that generates valuable information on our customers’ likes and preferences,
their level of satisfaction and their purchase intent. As customer profile data are obtained, control
boards can be designed to help marketing teams apply solutions and services one by one.
2. Production and route scheduling optimization: Technology connects not only customers, but
also all the machines that produce goods within a plant. Large amounts of production process
data are collected through sensors, in such a way that intelligence systems can detect areas of
improvement in real time and generate optimized production schedules. Predictive maintenance
is a reality: equipment failures can be forecast and their root causes easily detected with the
appropriate models. The real-time connection of distribution equipment, for raw materials or
finished product, can also optimize the fleet, in equipment and locality, delivery routes, fuel
consumption, etc.
3. Human resource analytics: The Digital Era demands highly trained and motivated human
resources. Each generation of collaborators has its strengths and weaknesses. BI systems make it
possible to collect data on the activities completed by collaborators and manage their
performance in real time. Tools are now available to talent management areas for identifying the
most productive profiles and for correlating work schedules and working conditions, leading to
the design of better incentive systems.

What are the most common factors that determine whether a Data / Business Intelligence (BI)
project is successful?

In many cases, the success rate depends entirely on the users, as well as how they use their data
and BI. It is difficult to say whether more low-end users are better than fewer, but higher-ranked
ones. This is also determined by the structure of the organization. The main criteria for
measuring a positive result can be presented as two variables: 1. whether processes are optimized
and 2. whether there are qualitatively new results, such as new processes and business niches.

What conditions should be in place to start a Business Intelligence project?

I would identify the processing and management culture in the organization as the most crucial
factors. If the people in the company, at different levels, have the necessary management culture,
then this is a good prerequisite for starting the project. As one of our customers said: “Any
company can produce and sell electricity, shoes or any other product. The difference between
successful and unsuccessful companies comes from how they use an asset called “Data”.” There
must be a critical mass of people involved in this culture. It is also essential to consider the
organizational structure since dashboards and KPIs are created in accordance with it. For
example, it doesn’t make sense to have a dashboard measuring a company’s digital presence, if
you don’t have a digital marketing specialist.
Obstacle to Business Intelligence in an Organization:

1. Ensuring Data Quality

Data Quality and completeness are important success factors for all BI efforts. It is critical for
organizations to perform basic auditing to ensure the validity of the data. This is especially vital
for data that will be used for measures and indicators.

Since data is utilized differently for Business Intelligence than it is in other user cases, auditing
often reveals data quality issues that would mostly go undiscovered without these efforts. When
an issue is recognized and the root cause determined, the project is launched to close the data
quality gap.

2. Absence of Execution and Training

Many times, businesses have all-around enunciated necessities, a decent apparatus setup, a sound
BI systems, but still require specialized abilities. There is a need to have personnel that is well
trained to handle the BI systems but many organizations lack this.

The reason for absence of execution frequently are different and fluctuated, similar to it cures.
This requires extra training in data administration applications. Organizations need to focus on
understanding their assets, why BI service is required, and the benefits of a BI solution. The most
important training that they would require is getting comfortable with the visual interface after
picking the right BI stage.

3. Unifying BI across All User Groups

One of the main challenges is having a unified BI tool that includes central governance, security,
and management across all users inside or outside your organization. There is not a single BI
platform that can offer every capability that users require But an upgraded BI tools¸ helps
businesses to overcome the challenge of reaching out to only a few users.

4. Targeting Big Needs with a Centralized Team

Another BI challenge faced by organizations is the lack of a centralized team. The lack of such a
team means that the needs are not well looked into and some areas are neglected which may lead
to the failure of BI.

The work of the centralized team is to drive organizational alignment on the big deals by
initiating and managing BI deliverables and working to enable successful integration into the
organization’s operations. The team will gather requirements for each participating department
and develop a prioritized roadmap for implementation.
 5. Self-Service BI

The ability to deliver self-service reporting and analysis across an organization is a big Business
Intelligence challenge. One of the biggest problem with traditional BI tools is that they are
complicated to use to an extent that only a few key individuals within the company know how to
use them. Problems can quickly form around these key individuals which can slow down the
entire reporting process.

To address this issue, organizations need to work to deliver full self-service BI data stewards and
other end users. This way, users can access data models within the organization data mart and
create their own reports. They can also download the data models into their personal sandbox
areas after which they can add or remove data, create their own relationships, restructure models,
calculated columns, measures and KPIs.

6. Extending Value with BI “Soft-Serve”

Unlike the self-service BI, soft-serve Bi doesn’t allow end users to access and manipulate data
from the data warehouse, only reports.

But, the soft-serve Bi model has considerable value since an organization can standardize data,
indicators, measures, visualizations, and reports while empowering end users to adjust reports as
needed to take care of their unique requirements.

7. Unlocking Data buried in Systems

Regardless of whether you have the data already in place and know where to get it does not
automatically mean that it is easily accessible.

Accessing the information you need, when you need it can be quite a process when the data is
buried in complex systems and software. In order to gain any real value from your data, you
must transform and manipulate it into the right shape. You can clean up your data using a data
warehouse and an effective ETL process and get it into the right shape and apply any business
calculations or rules.

8. Cost - TCO

Business Intelligence is costly—assets and expenses plans have always been tight especially for
small businesses. However, this has changed with the introduction of SSBI stages. The cost of
transmitting BI is a worry only among the SMEs. SMEs are weakened by the obstructive costs of
obtaining the correct programming.
Currently, a few stages make SSBI open to small businesses without causing anyone to spend a
substantial amount of cash. Similarly, constrained assets means looking for qualified
professionals. In this case, small businesses should look for BI dealers offering adaptable
arrangements with minimal TCO.

9. Huge Infrastructure Investment

In the past, expensive BI solutions required huge hardware resources. In addition to increasing
the installation price, these data marts and processors also increased the time required for setting
up.

However, with modern solutions, you can implement BI either with the existing hardware or by
running on virtualized infrastructure in the cloud. The fact is that most SSBI channels can ably
use the hardware resources of an office computer for all data processes. There is no need to buy a
SQL server or an additional hardware to start using BI to empower your decision-making

10. Unstructured Data of BI

Organizations may invest into massive data analysis but can’t complete the tasks in time.
Business owners are switching to creative BI devices to tackle this BI challenge. This may result
in endless hours of cleaning and organizing data first and then using the BI service.

This can undoubtedly blend distinctive datasets without the need to rebuild databases or set up a
data supply center. A BI service could be loaded with programmed ETL abilities to process
datasets that need to be rebuilt. This allows small business to interface all their data sources, see
past the numbers and find new connections and identify patterns to eliminate the mystery from
crucial business choices.