Understanding the Elements of Business Intelligence

Identifying, extracting, and analyzing of business data. Talks about the skills, processes, technologies, applications, and practices used to influence the internal and external information of a company or a business. These are two important definitions of business intelligence that is easy to understand. Enable company owners to have decision-making based on facts to support the mission and goals of the company. This is the primary purpose why BI was created. In its simplest form, the purpose of it is to help business succeed in the industry they are in. The internal and external information becomes an asset to support and improve the decision-making.

All things are comprised of different elements. These are fundamental and important parts of things that make it effective. For business intelligence, it has at least 12 primary elements. In this particular write-up, 7 out of the 12 elements would be discussed which includes analytics, customer relationship management (CRM), dashboards, data warehouse, data integration, data mining, and on-line analytical processing (OLAP). Understanding what these elements are for can help in understanding business intelligence significantly.

The first element, analytics, functions in discovering and understanding of historical patterns through studying of data with the help of statistical analysis. It also operates as an application of computer technology, operational research, and statistics to solve problems in business and industry. The second element, customer relationship management, operates by dealing with the interactions between the company and its customers, clients, and sales prospects. CRM also functions in the organizing, automating, and synchronizing of business processes which is being used in marketing, customer service, and technical support. The final element which is the dashboard, functions in the visual presentation of performance measures, identifying and correcting of negative trends, and generating of detailed reports showing new trends. Making the executive information system readable is the main function of dashboards.

Another element of business intelligence is data warehouse. This was designed to facilitate reporting and analysis across the business. Functioning of data warehouse is in 3 layers: staging, used to store raw data for developers; integration, used to integrate data and have a level of abstraction from users; and access, employed for getting data out for consumers. Data integration includes combining data found in different resources and providing users with a one view of these data. Data mining is a type of database analysis used in finding useful behaviour or interactions in a group of information. It uses state-of-the-art statistical methods like cluster analysis. It also uses artificial intelligence or artificial intelligence. Online analytical processing is BI element that provides end users with access to large amounts of data in a natural and rapid manner. It assists in deductions which are based in investigative reasoning. OLAP systems support the complex analysis requirements of decision-makers and the analyzing of data from a number of various perspectives.

The elements discussed above are important so it should be remembered. Without it, business intelligence would not function to its full capability. Knowing this also can give prospective user a wider knowledge of the system.

To learn and understand about business intelligence reporting tools, don’t forget to check-out this article.