Documenting Business Intelligence

Chiradeep Majumdar Flextronics Software Systems

Documenting Business Intelligence

Contents
 Definition of Business Intelligence  Scenario  Deduction  Analysis  Goals of Business Intelligence  Benefits of Business Intelligence  Why Should Business Intelligence be Documented?  Who Should Document Business Intelligence?  Qualities of a Good Documenter

Contents
          

Challenges in Documenting Business Intelligence Tools for Documenting Business Intelligence Data Warehouse Objectives of Data Warehousing Data Warehousing Trends Data Warehousing Process Architecture of a Data Warehouse Evaluation Criteria for Data Warehouse Data Mart Data Mart Architecture Data Mining

Definition of Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence is the process of researching the business environment and key performance indicators (KPIs) of a company to:
 Understand the current position of the business  Identify opportunities and risks  Devise a strategy for business development

Scenario
Managers and executives need to analyze many business situations and find answers to several questions to be able to formulate strategies and policies aimed at increasing competitive advantage.

Scenario
Typical questions whose answers managers try to find are:
 Purchase: Who is the vendor that supplied the maximum quantity of product A?  Production: What has been the average productivity and capacity utilization in the current production cycle?  QA: How many products were defective last week? Have the number of defective products increased/decreased in the current production cycle?

Scenario
Typical questions whose answers managers try to find are:
 Sales: How did the product A fare in regions R1 and R2 compared to the competitors product ?  Finance: What is the net profit for this quarter?  Customer Service: Why wasnt the product delivered to the customer on time? When was the last time the customer reported the problem X in the product?

Deduction
All these questions are related to:
    

Who What How Why When

Analysis
To find answers to such questions, managers need to analyze data from both the micro and macro environments:
 Micro Environment

Operational data pertaining to several processes, such as production, finance.  Macro Environment  MIS data pertaining to competitors  Customer trends


Goals of Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence encompasses a collection of processes, tools, and technologies that enable you to:
    

Organize Integrate Summarize Analyze and Extrapolate

operational data

Goals of Business Intelligence

 The rapid pace of todays business has made Business

Intelligence systems indispensable to an organizations success.  Business Intelligence systems turn a companys raw data into useable information that can help the management to identify important trends, analyze customer behavior, and make intelligent business decisions quickly.

Benefits of Business Intelligence

 Reduces operating costs  Increases profitability by improving

productivity, sales, and service  Enhances the decision-making capabilities of managers  Helps in business development by studying market trends and competitor activities

Why Should Business Intelligence be Documented?

 To identify issues in the business scenario  To provide the groundwork for an agreement

on the business issues between the client and the solution provider

Who Should Document Business Intelligence ?

Client Organization
 Project Manager  System Analyst

Solution Provider
 Project Manager  Engineer

Qualities of a Good Documenter

 Strong analytical skills  Good Communication skills  Good knowledge of the business scenario  Good knowledge of the market

Challenges in Documenting Business Intelligence

 Relationships between entities not well defined  Special ability required to capture fuzzy relationships  Inability of the developer to communicate the fuzzy

relationships

Tools for Documenting Business Intelligence

 Data Warehouse  Data Marts  Data Mining

Data Warehouse
Data warehouse is a subject-oriented, integrated, nonvolatile, and time-variant collection of data that supports managerial decision making.

Objectives of Data Warehousing

A company invests in Data warehousing to:
      

Improve it decision making process Improve customer service Beat competition Execute corporate strategy initiative Reduce cost of operations Retain key customers Identify new customers

Data Warehousing Trends

 Rapid increase in information democracy  Requirement for frequent and accurate decisions  Requirement for personalized information  Diversity of data  Need for better data security

Data Warehousing Process

 Raw data is stored  Information is cleansed  Data mining, query, and analytical tools are

employed to generate intelligence  The system is regulated by an overall corporate security policy  Business performance management applications are used to track results

Architecture of a Data Warehouse

A graphic showing the architecture of a Data Warehouse will be provided.

Evaluation Criteria for a Data Warehouse

 Performance  Availability  Reliability  Manageability  Scalability

Data Mart
 Data Mart typically means a small Data Warehouse.  A Data Mart:  Is typically designed for one or few departments or subject areas.  Works as an isolated island of information.  Can be integrated to a larger data repository.  Keeps higher levels of summarization compared to data warehouses.  A Data Mart will be ineffective if it cannot be integrated

with the larger data management entity of the organization.

Data Mart Architecture

A graphic showing the architecture of a Data Mart will be provided.

Data Mining
 Data mining refers to a class of tools that apply

artificial intelligence techniques to analyze data.  OLAP tools can be used for data mining  The user must formulate own hypotheses before using the Data Mining tools.

THANK YOU

QUESTIONS