By Ghazwan Khalid Auda

Elements of Business Intelligence

Knowledge Management
Operational systems deal with data.
informational systems such as data warehouses empower the users by capturing, integrating, storing, and transforming the data into useful information for analysis and decision making. Knowledge management takes the empowerment to a higher level. It completes the process by providing users with knowledge to use the right information, at the right time, and at the right place.

Knowledge Management is a deliberate, systematic business optimization strategy that selects, distills, stores, organizes, packages, and communicates information essential to the business of a company in a manner that improves employee performance and corporate competitiveness.

Knowledge Management
From this definition, it should be clear that knowledge management is fundamentally about a systematic approach to managing information in a way that provides the company with a competitive advantage.
Knowledge management is a business optimization strategy, and not limited to a particular technology or source of information. In most cases, a wide variety of information technologies play a key role in a KM initiative, why?

Knowledge Management
Knowledge management refers to doing what is needed to get the most out of knowledge resource.
What the types of Knowledge?

KM focuses on creating, sharing, and applying knowledge. The traditional emphasis in KM has been on explicit Knowledge (i.e., Knowledge that is recognized and is already articulated in some form), but, increasingly, KM has also incorporated managing important tacit knowledge (knowledge that is difficult to articulate and formalize, including insights and intuitions).
The aim of knowledge management is not necessarily to manage all knowledge, just the knowledge that is most important to the organization. It is about ensuring that people have the knowledge they need, where they need it, when they need it the right knowledge, in the right place, at the right time.

Data Warehouse
A data warehouse is a subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant and nonvolatile collection of data in support of management's decision making process. These terms can be defined as follows:
Subject-Oriented: ? Integrated: ? Time-Variant: ?

Non-volatile: ?

Data Warehouse
Beginning with the late 1980s and into the 1990s enterprises began building such system environments.
This new environment, known as the data warehouse environment, is kept separate from the system environment that supports the routine day-to-day operations. The data warehouse essentially has become the source of strategic information for the enterprise to enable strategic decision making. Warehouse is collections of information assembled for users to meet their practical business needs. It is not about theory, and it is not about computer systems. It is about business needs and the survival of the corporation in a competitive environment .

Data Mining
Data mining has attracted a great deal of attention in the information industry and in society as a whole in recent years, due to the wide availability of huge amounts of data and the imminent need for turning such data into useful information and knowledge. The information and knowledge gained can be used for applications ranging from market analysis, fraud detection, and customer retention, to production control and science exploration.
The need to understand large, complex, information-rich data sets is common to virtually all fields of business, science, and engineering. In the business world, corporate and customer data are becoming recognized as a strategic asset. The ability to extract useful knowledge hidden in these data and to act on that knowledge is becoming increasingly important in today's competitive world. The entire process of applying a computer-based methodology, including new techniques, for discovering knowledge from data is called data mining.

Data Mining
Many people treat data mining as a synonym for another popularly used term, Knowledge Discovery from Data, or KDD. Alternatively, others view data mining as simply an essential step in the process of knowledge discovery. Knowledge discovery as a process is depicted as shown in Figure below and consists of an iterative sequence of the following steps:
1. Data cleaning (to remove noise and inconsistent data). 2. Data integration (where multiple data sources may be combined) 3. Data selection (where data relevant to the analysis task are retrieved from the database). 4. Data transformation (where data are transformed or consolidated into forms appropriate for mining by performing summary or aggregation operations, for instance). 5. Data mining (an essential process where intelligent methods are applied in order to extract data patterns) 6. Pattern evaluation (to identify the truly interesting patterns representing knowledge based on some interestingness measures) 7. Knowledge presentation (where visualization and knowledge representation techniques are used to present the mined knowledge to the user)

Data Mining

Data Mining
With the amount of data doubling every three years, the practice of data mining has become an increasingly used process to extract information from data. Data mining can reveal patterns about how and when customers buy. This information can be highly valuable in predicting sales and formulating relevant marketing strategies. Data mining is the analysis of (often large) observational data sets to find unsuspected relationships and to summarize the data in novel ways that are both understandable and useful to the data owner.
The telecommunications industry was one of the first to adopt data mining technology. This is most likely because telecommunication companies routinely generate and store enormous amounts of high-quality data, have a very large customer base, and operate in a rapidly changing and highly competitive environment. Telecommunication companies utilize data mining to improve their marketing efforts, identify fraud, and better manage their telecommunication networks.

Data Mining
Data mining is the search for new, valuable, and nontrivial information in large volumes of data. It is a cooperative effort of humans and computers. Best results are achieved by balancing the knowledge of human experts in describing problems and goals with the search capabilities of computers. There are a handful of data mining tasks, including classification, regression, association, clustering, forecasting, fraud detection, and visualization. These tasks cover hundreds of business scenarios.

Business Analysis
Business analysis is the process of analyzing trusted data with the goal of highlighting useful information, supporting decision making, suggesting solutions to business problems, and improving business processes. A business intelligence environment helps organizations and business users move from manual to automated business analysis.
Data warehouse systems provide some data analysis capabilities, collectively referred to as OLAP. Analytical processing supports basic OLAP operations, including slice-and-dice, drill-down, roll-up, and pivoting. It generally operates on historical data in both summarized and detailed forms. The major strength of on-line analytical processing over information processing is the multidimensional data analysis of data warehouse data.

Business Analysis
Data warehouses provide OLAP tools for the interactive analysis of multidimensional data of varied granularities, which facilitates effective data generalization and data mining. Data warehouses and OLAP tools are based on a multidimensional data model. This model views data in the form of a data cube. Hence, the data warehouse has become an increasingly important platform for data analysis and on-line analytical processing and will provide an effective platform for data mining. Therefore, data warehousing and OLAP form an essential step in the knowledge discovery process.
Multidimensional analysis has become a popular way to extend the capabilities of query and reporting. That is, rather than submitting multiple queries, data are structured to enable fast and easy access to answers to the questions that are typically asked. For example, the data would be structured to include answers to the question, How much of each of our products was sold on a particular day, by a particular sales person, in a particular store? Each separate part of that query is called a dimension. Having the data categorized by these different factors, or dimensions, makes them easier to understand, particularly by business-oriented users of the data. Dimensions can have individual entities or a hierarchy of entities, such as region, store, and department.

Business Analysis
Cubes are n-dimensional structures because they can store data in an infinite number of dimensions. A conceptual rendering of a cube is shown in Figure below.

Business Analysis
The complex relationships can be analyzed through an iterative process that includes drilling down to lower levels of detail or rolling up to higher levels of summarization and aggregation. Decision-makers use OLAP systems to improve their management by analyzing aggregated historical data. Figure below demonstrates that the decision maker can start by viewing the total sales for the organization and drilling down to view the sales by continent, region, country, and finally by customer. Or, the decision maker could start at customer and roll up through the different levels to finally reach total sales.

The End