Business Intelligence

Andrew Davis

Andria Zippler

Jana Krinsky

Tiffany Ferris

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence, or BI, has recently become a hot topic in business information technology.

Do you know anything about BI? What comes to mind in relation to this term?

BI Fundamentals

Business Transactions

Data Bases

Data Warehouses

Data Marts

Data Mining

Data bases (DB or DBMS)

“A collection of information organized in such a way that a computer program can quickly select desired pieces of data.” http://www.webopedia.com

An electronic filing system Organized by

Fields: a single piece of information Records: one complete set of fields Files: a collection of record

Data warehouse (DW)

“Contain a wide variety of data that present a coherent picture of business conditions at a single point in time.” http://www.webopedia.com

“A database system which contains periodically collected samples or summarized (aggregated) transactional data; e.g., daily totals, or monthly averages”

Typically a compilation of information from multiple transactional databases

Data mart

“A database, or collection of databases, designed to help managers make strategic decisions about their business.” http://www.webopedia.com

A smaller and more focused form of a data warehouse.

Usually created for a particular department or position A data mart created as a subset of data warehouse

data are referred to as a “dependent data mart”.

Business intelligence (BI)

‘”The tools and systems that play a key role in the strategic planning process of the corporation. These systems allow a company to gather, store, access and analyze corporate data to aid in decision making .” http://www.webopedia.com

Common applications: customer profiling customer support market research market segmentation product profitability statistical analysis inventory and distribution analysis

Data mining

“A class of database applications that look for patterns in data to be used to predict and direct future behavior.”

Increasingly being used by marketers to find consumer data through the web and store purchases.

The BI Chain

Transactions Data are stored in the database

Database info is periodically summarized (aggregated) and put into the data warehouse

Summary data are further condensed into a data mart for specific department or executives

Data mining takes place to identify useful information through a search for patterns

Interpretation of information is used to make strategic decisions

What does BI seek to find?

Patterns

What kind of patterns? Sales Stocks Anything useful

Techniques for Finding Patterns

Statistics Trends Correlation

(searching for a best fit)

Patterns continued

Combinatorial If-then relationships

Example If we put chips on sale on a Friday, then

we also sell more soda.

The “Shakeout”

The Gartner BI Matrix Compares the

completeness of a company’s vision to its ability to execute that vision.

Leading the Industry

Cognos BI software company (most recently Cognos 8)

Software Used for reporting, analysis, scorecarding,

dashboards, business event management, and data integration

Cognos

Multiple Solutions Industry

Banking Education Defense Government

Department Executive Management Finance Marketing

Who uses BI?

Businesses The Government ? ?

What are some ethical implications of the use of BI?

Sources

http://www.webopedia.com http://www.cognos.com http://www.gartner.com