The Power of Business Intelligence

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Introduction As the business environment changes and becomes more complicated, enterprises are under huge stress to respond and be innovative to such conditions. Enterprises decision making needs to quick and strategic and so making such decisions can be very complex. What this report of Business intelligence (BI) will describe is the tools available to manager to support such decisions, the possible benefits and the limitations of BI. (Turban et al., 2011) Turban et al., (2011, p. 28) describes business intelligence (BI) as ‘an umbrella term that combines architectures, tools, databases, analytical tools, applications, and methodologies. It is a content-free expression, so it means different things to different people’. The key goal of BI is to allow for interactive access to data which can be in real-time, easy manipulation of the data, and the ability for management to be able to do suitable analysis of the data. Managers are then able to make more accurate and better decisions through BI by looking at old and new data. (Turban et al., 2011) Ultimately, Business intelligence has the ability to simplify how managers access and analyse data which makes understanding, collaborating, and acting on information at any point much simpler for decision makers. (Microsoft, 2014) Turban et al., (2011, p. 30) states that ‘A Business system has four major components’. 1. Data Warehouse 2. Business Analytics 3. Business Performance Management 4. User Interface Figure 1: Business Intelligence Overview (Turban et al., 2011, p.29) Data Warehousing Turban et al., (2011, p. 52) describes a data warehouse as being ‘a pool of data produced to support decision making; it is also a repository of current and historical data of potential interest to managers throughout the organisation’. Turban et al., (2011, p. 52) went on to state that ‘data are usually structured to be available in a form ready for analytical processing activities (i.e. data mining, querying, reporting and other support applications)’. In order to conduct businesses processes in the correct manner it is important to use various tools such as BI tools and a combination of real-time data warehousing (RDW) with decision support system (DSS). By having appropriate, dependable information about current trends, changes etc… decision makers are able to make better choices. Data warehousing has the ability to give managers crucial operational data in a reliable, timely and dependable manner. (Turban et al., 2011) Characteristics of Data Warehousing: • Subject orientated: e.g. sales, which will only have significant information to support decision making • Integrated • Time Variant (time series): Data warehouses must take into consideration time because it is one of the most important dimensions

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