1.

What is Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence is a form of business management that takes business forward by the proper use of available information and data. Getting ahead in the competition requires essential analysis of the factbased data associated with a particular industry then this suggests the necessary action for driving the business towards profit oriented. So its the ability to use existing information i.e. the data the company already owns in a productive manner. The operational system of a small industry or a vast organization deals with a huge amount of data related to product, market, customer, technology etc. etc. but they hardly exploit those data in a profitable way or giving a boost to their business. These data can be taken into strategic analysis and treated as valuable information input for better application in respective field. Data generally includes reports form government agencies, trade associations, business analysts, Internet, and many other sources but the hidden knowledge in these kinds of data needs to be explored and applied for developing successful corporate strategies. It assists in answering the following general but essential questions that every industry needs to know for improving corporate performance:

Who are the best and worst customers? It is important to identify the needs of customer and categories them as best and worst and then concentrate on any particular section for increasing sales by taking proper measures. What are the factors responsible for increasing and decreasing sales? What more one can offer customers comparing to others? Which products or areas responsible for gaining or losing money?

Keeping in mind such questions the concept of Business Intelligence identify, analyze and monitor corporate trends, competitor and market status, and later point out basic requirements for improving the knowledge and performance of the enterprise as a whole. There are various application and technology including business management software available to generate business value that can be acted as catalyst for growth. Hence, it is the technology that transfers data into productive information for creating some innovative business ideas.

2. History of Business Intelligence

The 20th and 21st century are known as the information and technology (IT) age where everything depends on the availability of information and innovation of new technology. This is so in the case of business as technological innovations like World Wide Web and Internet has provided a broad and open platform to the business conducted in all over the world. As developing any successful business strategy requires information and adequate knowledge about market status, the innovation of new technology and concepts like BI made it easy to access and manage all kinds of information.
3. Business Intelligence Tools

We have already discussed that Business Intelligence is a process to collect data and extract information and then analyzing them in developing new and innovative business ideas but the whole method is based on different computing tools. These BI tools are kinds of application software assist in collecting, analyzing and presenting data. Different business intelligence tools addresses different factors and aspects in different ways but all are useful in overall function of BI.
4. Business Intelligence Value Chain

In competitive marketplace it is vital for every business enterprise whether small or big to cope with the pace of the market growth. Intelligence is the ability to learn and understand new situations by updating yourself with current information. This is why organizations are becoming more dependent on data or information for improving development of product and services that can outsell their competitors. So, they are primarily relying on analytical database solutions like data warehouses. However, in the entire process these information and later applying them in action describes a chain of methods called value chain. Value chain is the process that converts data into information and then applies that knowledge in taking productive business decision, and the outcome is the ultimate value.
5. Business Intelligence in Decision Making

Today Business Intelligence is the primary tool to collect and analyze information for developing a successful business strategy. This is the age of information, technology and communication age its important to have full knowledge about all the strengths and weakness of your business plan and that can be possible only by analyzing available data. These data generally include quantities of product, customer, sales,

market demand, customer service, and technical support system etc., that are useful in critical decision-making.
6. Privacy and Security Issues in BI

With the growth of Business Intelligence market, the privacy and security issues are also growing concern over business community. It is everyones right to control information about them and there are laws and policies to safeguard individual right but are ineffective. Companies use BI to collect and analyze data for improving their performance, therefore it becomes important to access and maintain secure information. Though, on one side technological developments make it easy to access information freely from various sources on the other hand it becomes essential to develop system that can secure that information from misuse by outsiders.
7. The Future of Business Intelligence

Information and communication technology has offered a single platform to world market irrespective of geographical position. Growing number of consumers with varied demand and expectation make it very difficult to conduct any kind of business. To stay competitive, meet customers needs are now the primary concern for every organization. However, the adoption of Business Intelligence system is supporting to stay ahead from the market trends and expectation of the customer. It assists in preparing business strategies keeping in mind the future events by analyzing available data. Data analysis and decision making has made the use of BI inevitable and hence is going to be a major part of in all kinds of business.
8. Business Intelligence in Healthcare

To make a profit driven business decision, every company depends on their strategic planning and decision-making ability and that depends on the kinds of information available and the ability to sort out the relevant ones for analysis. Business Intelligence (BI) is solely offers solution to data warehousing and data analysis and hence is now the most talked about technology in the world business arena. BI is now used in various sectors for increasing productivity by carefully studying data, sharing and extracting value from it so in the case of hospital management or health sector.
9. Business Intelligence in Insurance

Success in todays business world is defined by the ability to access

sophisticated data and derive information that is now primary need to survive in the competitive market place. This is also true in insurance business that deals with rich and complex data structure and most of them are real-time. So to compete in the volatile market place with high customer demand information is pre-requisite. This makes insurance companies using Business Intelligence tools like data warehousing, data mining and OLAP. Use of BI supports in targeting right customer and the reason for customer depreciation.
10. Business Intelligence for Telecommunications

The telecommunication market is growing rapidly with new technological innovation and new service providers thereby creating a competitive platform. Revolutionary changes are taking place with acquisition, consolidation, new regulations and most importantly privatization that make customer satisfaction the primary object of every service provider. New regulations are making more and more pressure and creating avenues for new opportunities.
11. Business Intelligence in Retail

Today in every business the most challenging job is to make yourself efficient enough for surviving in this volatile market place. The only solution to this problem is to have as much actionable information of the respective field that gives an insight to the current market trend, thereby advocating an intelligent business decision.
12. BI: Improving performance in financial service

Financial service industry generally includes banking, security exchange and international finance like currency exchange and foreign investment. The chief banking sector is the major field with savings, loans, commercial banks, credit unions and banks for mortgage. In all these business, the primary focusing point is management of finance.
13. Business Intelligence: Power to gain competitive advantage

With the development of Business Intelligence technology companies of all sectors are increasingly depending on different Business Intelligence tools and software for better information management. Making the right decision for your company requires better analysis of the available data but discovering the right knowledge among those tides of information flow is the key behind the success of every corporation.

14. BI: Key for building profits in B2B

In business you need to find out answers to questions like why one product is bought more by customer and others not? What is the best market for a particular product? What are the basic customers needs for a product? Here, Business Intelligence can answer such questions effectively and this article throws light on some aspects that are vital for your profitability.
15. Business Intelligence Solutions in India

In this globalize world everything has just come into a single platform and so the business that has created an imminence competitive environment in every sector. This competitiveness has created a new kind of business arrangements with collaboration in terms of merger and accusation between companies.
The most common tools used for business intelligence are as follows. They are listed in the following order: Increasing cost, increasing functionality, increasing business intelligence complexity, and decreasing number of total users. Excel Take a guess what's the most common business intelligence tool? You might be surprised to find out it's Microsoft Excel. There are several reasons for this: 1. It's relatively cheap. 2. It's commonly used. You can easily send an Excel sheet to another person without worrying whether the recipient knows how to read the numbers. 3. It has most of the functionalities users need to display data. In fact, it is still so popular that all third-party reporting / OLAP tools have an "export to Excel" functionality. Even for home-built solutions, the ability to export numbers to Excel usually needs to be built. Excel is best used for business operations reporting and goals tracking. Reporting tool

In this discussion, I am including both custom-built reporting tools and the commercial reporting tools together. They provide some flexibility in terms of the ability for each user to create, schedule, and run their own reports. The Reporting Tool Selectionselection discusses how one should select an OLAP tool. Business operations reporting and dashboard are the most common applications for a reporting tool. OLAP tool OLAP tools are usually used by advanced users. They make it easy for users to look at the data from multiple dimensions. OLAP tools are used for multidimensional analysis.

OLAP Tool Selection

Buy vs. Build OLAP tools are geared towards slicing and dicing of the data. As such, they require a strong metadata layer, as well as front-end flexibility. Those are typically difficult features for any home-built systems to achieve. Therefore, my recommendation is that if OLAP analysis is part of your charter for building a data warehouse, it is best to purchase an existing OLAP tool rather than creating one from scratch. OLAP Tool Functionalities Before we speak about OLAP tool selection criterion, we must first distinguish between the two types of OLAP tools, MOLAP (Multidimensional OLAP) and ROLAP (Relational OLAP). 1. MOLAP: In this type of OLAP, a cube is aggregated from the relational data source (data warehouse). When user generates a report request, the MOLAP tool can generate the create quickly because all data is already pre-aggregated within the cube.

2. ROLAP: In this type of OLAP, instead of pre-aggregating everything into a cube, the ROLAP engine essentially acts as a smart SQL generator. The ROLAP tool typically comes with a 'Designer' piece, where the data warehouse administrator can specify the relationship between the relational tables, as well as how dimensions, attributes, and hierarchies map to the underlying database tables. Right now, there is a convergence between the traditional ROLAP and MOLAP vendors. ROLAP vendor recognize that users want their reports fast, so they are implementing MOLAP functionalities in their tools; MOLAP vendors recognize that many times it is necessary to drill down to the most detail level information, levels where the traditional cubes do not get to for performance and size reasons. So what are the criteria for evaluating OLAP vendors? Here they are: Ability to leverage parallelism supplied by RDBMS and hardware: This would greatly increase the tool's performance, and help loading the data into the cubes as quickly as possible. Performance: In addition to leveraging parallelism, the tool itself should be quick both in terms of loading the data into the cube and reading the data from the cube. Customization efforts: More and more, OLAP tools are used as an advanced reporting tool. This is because in many cases, especially for ROLAP implementations, OLAP tools often can be used as a reporting tool. In such cases, the ease of front-end customization becomes an important factor in the tool selection process. Security Features: Because OLAP tools are geared towards a number of users, making sure people see only what they are supposed to see is important. By and large, all established OLAP tools have a security layer that can interact with the common corporate login protocols. There are, however, cases where large corporations have developed their own user authentication mechanism and have a "single sign-on" policy. For these cases, having a seamless integration between the tool and the in-house authentication can require some work. I would recommend that you have the tool vendor team come in and make sure that the two are compatible.

 Metadata support: Because OLAP tools aggregates the data into the cube and sometimes serves as the front-end tool, it is essential that it works with the metadata strategy/tool you have selected. Popular Tools

Business Objects Cognos Hyperion Microsoft Analysis Services MicroStrategy Pentaho Palo OLAP Server

Data mining tool Data mining tools are usually only by very specialized users, and in an organization, even large ones, there are usually only a handful of users using data mining tools. Data mining tools are used for finding correlation among different factors What is BI - Business Intelligence? BI is an abbreviation of the two words Business Intelligence, bringing the right information at the right time to the right people in the right format. It is a 5-step process to run your business smarter, starting with registering the right data correctly, collecting the data from multiple sources, transforming, combineing and storing it in a data warehouse. This data should be reported, analysed and distributed to the right people at the right time in the right format. The figure below shows these steps.

Business Intelligence is about connecting people using a proper information infrastructure and performance driven culture, enabling them working more closely together towards company and personal goals. The successfactors of business intelligence are described in our research paper 'Making business intelligence successful'. Different applications and tools may exist in a business intelligence infrastructure, including reporting tools. These are all covered in the BI Tool Survey Report.

Basic Business Intelligence

This type of application is mainly used to understand the business processes, and the operational results, of the organisation. This basic application contains often just a collection of reports, used for operational purposes.

Corporate performance management (CPM)

An application used to optimise the business processes of an organisation, and more importantly to align strategy with execution, and vice versa. Key performance indicators (KPI's), key result indicators (KRI's) and performance indicators (PI) are defined in order to see how things are going, in perspective of each other. Once you have this type of application running, you can alter and execute strategies more quickly. In a fast changing environment, this will not be an overkill.

Customer Analytics / CRM

For each organisation, customers should be considered and treated as the most important business partner. Because of that, many organisations understand that to be fully customer oriented, they should have a 360 degree view of the customer. This BI application, often implemented side by side with a Customer Relationship management system, collects all the customer data that a organisation registers, combine it and display it to the users in different formats.

Marketing intelligence

An application to measure the effectiveness of the marketing activities, for example to measure the relationship between ads and the revenue by product. With marketing intelligence, we measure and analyse also market shares, market growth, brand awareness, the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and product portfolio. With this application we can get a clear view of the contribution of marketing to the other activities of the company.

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)

This application, often called BAM, makes it possible to discover real-time or near real-time what is happening in daily operations. Mostly used to report sudden deviations in critical business processes from the standard patterns or norms, for example a sudden increase of the back log, or a decrease of the stock of some specific medicins. Thanks to BAM, people can get alerted before things are getting real worse.

BI for the supply chain

Pivotal in this application is integration of information with your business partners in a very structured way, using the internet, to enable a more smoothly running supply chain. It can support better vendor management, monitor stocks in the entire supply chain, give more flexibility to connect new vendors in the chain, enhance the speed and reliability of deliveries, and a on-demand supply chain.

Metadata management
Information about all the data that is processed, from source systems to target reports and dashboard, is often put into a metadata repository; a database containing all the metadata. The entire process can be 'managed' with metadata management, for example one can query how a specific key performance indicator (KPI) is built-up in the process, calleddata lineage. Or, you want to know what the impact of a change will be, for example the size of the order identifier (id) is changed, and in which steps this attribute plays a role.

Choosing and selecting a BI tool It is fairly common in many organisations that there is no software selection process at all. Sometimes there is a corporate standard you need to comply with, or you may have a database or reporting tool in place from a specific vendor, and you decide to buy a BI tool from the same vendor, because you expect that these will integrate better with each other. Often organisations find it difficult and labour intensive to execute a software selection process in order to gather all the necessary data. The BI Tool Survey Report is designed to help you perform the selection quickly and efficiently. There are many more reasons why to buy the report. 1. Create a business intelligence strategy
Choosing and selecting a BI tool is a process that begins with defining a business intelligence strategy, compliant with the overall business strategy and requirements. Without a proper bi strategy, buying a BI tool, will be the same as buying a very nice and expensive car, which runs on a type of fuel which is not available in the country where you want to drive it!

2. Define criteria in business terms

Once the strategy is clear, you can define the business critical selection criteria, like 'Our business people want to keep track of history'. In that case you need an BI Tool that has standard support for slowly changing dimensions out-of-the-box. Another example: one of the business strategies is to exchange more critical information with customers and vendors. You need a BI tool that performs well with a huge number of users, having a robust infrastructure with load balancing and clustering. By doing so, we make a clear connection between the criteria and the business strategy, an essential factor for success.

3. Create a short-list
Once you have all the criteria in place, you will be able, with the information in BI Tool Survey Report be able to decide which tools match your criteria. From there, you can create easily a shortlist of two or three solutions.

4. Invite vendors for a live demonstration

In this phase of the BI selection process, you will invite the vendors on the short-list for a live demonstration of their solution. We recommended that you prepare this meeting in detail with the vendor, to avoid demonstrations by PowerPoint. If possible, provide the vendors with some company data, so you can easily see the relevance of what is demonstrated and judge how well it functions.

5. Perform a proof-of-concept (PoC)

Doing a proof-of-concept (PoC) is essential for choosing a BI tool that suits your organisation. So you can test the solution in your own IT environment, and get a idea of the functionality,connectivity, usability and performance of each BI tool. Define beforehand what has to be done, what the results should be and what data should be used. Be sure, that the data in your source systems are accessible. In general, a proof-of-concept, can be done in three to five days. To keep negotiation options open, it is recommended that a PoC is performed with at least two vendors.

6. Negotiate with BI vendors

The last step before the end of the selection, is to negotiate with the BI vendors about the contract, including prices, maintenance, support, training and terms of use. Many software vendors require you to buy a runtime as well as a development license. Put all the different prices and terms in a spreadsheet, and calculate the costs over at least three years to see which vendor has the best conditions over a longer period.

7. Close the deal

Finally, you want to close the deal with the vendor that has the best support for your business intelligence strategy, and has the lowest costs. If you want help with above, please feel free to contact us.