Introduction to Business Intelligence
Business intelligence (BI) is an activity aimed at understanding both organizational activities and opportunities for the organization. As the word itself means the intelligence of business, its purpose is to enable the organization to ask the right questions using data from all or any business operations, customers, and competitors within or outside the industry, and to find new opportunities to grow—or survive. Business intelligence also refers to the set of technologies that bolster decision support tools, which enable users with a wide range of capabilities, from simple querying, advance analytics, and statistical analysis, to predictive and scenario modeling, and to visualize results using reports or dashboards.
There are multiple definitions that have evolved over time, however. Business intelligence was first defined in 1958 by Hans Peter Luhn in the IBM Journal articletitled “A Business Intelligence System.” This defines business intelligence as an ability of systems to present and understand the facts and relationships between these facts in such a way to guide action toward desired objectives and goals. Decision support systems (DSS), query, reporting, OLAP (online analytical processing), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining are some of the examples under the domain of BI technologies and applications. As noted, the definition of business intelligence in the beginning included activities like data gathering, storing, providing access, and analyzing data.
Another way business intelligence is defined as a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information that can be used to enable more effective strategic, tactical, and operational insights or decision-making.
As per DMBoK (Data Management Body of Knowledge), business intelligence management is defined as the planning, implementation, and control processes thatprovide decision support data and support knowledge workers engaged in reporting, query, and analysis. This definition is one of the most consistent and standard definitions of business intelligence.
At a broad level, there are three types of BI report. Figure 7-1 demonstrates these.
Figure 7-1. Types of BI report