Business Intelligence a World in itself !!!

Hello Everyone,

I would first like to thank people those who showed interest in reading this blog.

Have you ever wondered why does Super Market people keeps shifting stuff around ?  I never realized that there might be such a powerful strategy behind placing of all this stuff. The Concept is called as Market Basket Analysis. Lets have a look at  the methodology, concept, technology and tools behind all of this.

Before i get started with the concepts of Business Intelligence and dive into the mechanics of it, i want to make sure that any person who is reading this blog must be passionate about making a positive impact to the lives of people.

Without further adieu lets start our journey,

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence is a technology that helps you convert raw form of data into Information and actionable insights that could easily be utilized by business people in order to make important decisions. The three phases as i understood out of my First Class taught by Prof. Henry Childers can be broadly classified as following:

• Data Warehouse
•  Data Analysis.
•  Reporting and Dashboard Creation.

Now, lets have a look at each of these concepts in detail:

Data Warehouse:  Data Warehouse is a database used for reporting and data analysis. Integrating data from one or more sources such as flat files , Oracle database, SQL server database and many more  creating a central repository of data. Implementation of Data Warehouse involves several other processes such as extraction , transformation, staging and loading of data into Data Warehouse (whole process is commonly known as ETL).

Data Analysis : Data Analysis is one of the most interesting part in the whole domain of Business Intelligence. As the name clearly indicates this process is used for analyzing data. This process is used in analysis of billions and trillions of rows in a single click. The most important component that helps in analyzing data is called cube (a three dimensional model in order to analyze data).

Reporting and Dashboard Creation:  I term this part to be one of the most challenging part of the whole process as with changing business needs and changing time , the information that needs to be represented via reports or dashboards also gets changed. This is the part of the whole process that makes you realize that the way you see and perceive raw data is highly different from what you can do by utilizing the same data.

The more you dig deeper the more interesting it becomes, but not at the cost of concepts, but by realizing and seeing the impact that these concept make on businesses and lives of people. With this i conclude that Business Intelligence has become an essential part of the Corporate World.

As we move forward we will dig deeper and deeper and i would like to hold the discussion about the impact that Business Intelligence makes on Businesses for next time.

References:
The Data Warehouse Toolkit - Third Edition, Ralph Kimball and Margy Ross
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_warehouse
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Intelligence