Business Intelligence

The art of creating Information out of vast amounts of raw data

Business Intelligence has been described in a Gartner Group Report as:

“The key to thriving in a competitive marketplace is staying ahead of the competition. Making sound business decisions based on accurate and current information takes more than intuition. Data analysis, reporting and query tools can help business users wade through a sea of data to synthesise valuable information from it - today these tools collectively fall into a category called 'Business Intelligence'."

Business Intelligence tools

There are essentially three different types of Business Intelligence tools: Reporting tools, Analysis tools and Data Mining tools.

Reporting tools, such as SQL Server Reporting Services (and a host of other Reporting tools), dashboards and Excel spreadsheets either directly use the OLAP Cube or use the SQL Server OLAP Query Language MDX (Multi Dimensional Expressions) to extract the information and report it to the end user.

Analysis tools, such as Excel, allow the end user to extract a (large) subset of data from the data warehouse, after which this data can be filtered, sorted, put into Pivot Tables and otherwise manipulated until the information is presented in the correct way. In these cases the end user is generally responsible for the presentation of the information.

Data Mining applications analyse your data and then use artificial intelligence and pattern recognition to learn and find hidden patterns in your data. Classic examples are fraud detection, analysing customer behaviour and other situations where the sheer mass of data makes human interpretation difficult.