Business Intelligence - The Intro

BI Dashboard examples (Click to Enlarge)

Business Intelligence does not have a formal definition but the term is used for a variety of tools and activities used to analyze raw data and present it in a more meaningful and useful format for business analysis purposes.

The term Business Intelligence has been abbreviated to BI and is used alternatively. We will stick to using the abbreviated form BI for representing Business Intelligence in all our Articles, Blogs, Guides and Forums.

BI provides current performance status in relation to past performance and predictive  future views, and provides the target users (business leadership) the ability to modify (slice and dice) and dive deeper (drill down) or summarize (drill up) information. The data becomes even more useful when a comparison to industry specific benchmarks is incorporated.

BI helps organizational leadership to make informed decisions and take calculated risks in both operational and strategic spheres. KPI's can be established and performance can be measured against those. Performance Indicators breaching preset thresholds utilizing easy to read and at-a-glance visuals, can lead to further digging (slicing/dicing and drilling) into the data.



BI information is generally represented as Dashboards, which are collections of related visuals and reports, providing an at-a-glance . Raw data is converted into an OLAP cube. OLAP stands for Online Analytical Processing, which may be defined as a computer based technique for analyzing data and providing insights. Cube is used to define a mutli-dimensional data sets. traditionally a data set has two dimensions , rows and columns. OLAP cubes have more than two dimensions and those with more than three dimension are also sometimes refer to hypercubes. The advantage of cubes is the data is pre-processed and readily available for slicing, dicing and drilling, saving time compared to running queries in real-time against traditional relational data sets.