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What is Business Intelligence?
• Business intelligence (BI)
– Range of applications, practices, and technologies
for the extraction, translation, integration, analysis,
and presentation of data to support improved
decision making
– Make and act on predictions about future conditions
• Data comes from operational information captured
by a company’s ERP systems
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What is Business Intelligence?
(continued)
• Organizations must be extremely careful to protect
the data they use in their BI applications
• Most widely used BI software
– SAP, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft
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Data Warehouse/Data Marts
• Data warehouse
– Database that stores large amounts of historical data
in a form that readily supports analysis and
management decision making
– Holds a huge amount of data
– Data typically comes from numerous operational
systems and external data sources
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Data Warehouse/Data Marts
(continued)
• Extract-transform-load (ETL) process
– Used to pull data from disparate data sources to
populate and maintain the data warehouse
– Run as frequently as necessary
• Data mart
– Smaller version of a data warehouse
– Sometimes designed from scratch as a complete,
individual, miniature data warehouse
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Business Intelligence Tools
• Spreadsheets
– Perform operations on the data based on formulas
created by the end user
– Create useful reports and graphs based on that data
– “What if” analysis
• Reporting and Querying Tools
– Present data in an easy to understand fashion
– Enable end users to make their own data requests
and format the results without the need for additional
help from the IT organization
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Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
• Method to analyze multidimensional data from
many different perspectives
• Enables users to identify issues and opportunities
as well as perform trend analysis
• Data cubes
– Contain numeric facts called measures
– Categorized by dimensions such as time and
geography
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Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
(continued)
• Pre-aggregation of detailed data into useful
summaries
– Key to the quick responsiveness of OLAP
• If data within a data cube has been summarized at
a given level:
– Not possible to use that data cube to answer
questions at a more detailed level
• Not restricted to just three dimensions
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Drill-Down Analysis
• Powerful tool
– Gain insight into the details of business data to
better understand why something happened
• Interactive examination of high-level summary data
in increasing detail
– To gain insight into certain elements
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Data Mining
• BI tool
– Used to explore large amounts of data for hidden
patterns
– Predicts future trends and behaviors for use in
decision making
• Enables organizations to make predictions about
what will happen
• Techniques
– Association analysis
– Neural computing
– Case-based reasoning
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Data Mining (continued)
• Process
– Data repository creation
– Pattern recognition
– Deployment
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Reality Mining
• Study of human interaction
– Based on data gathered from mobile phones and
other portable communicating devices
• Applications
– Improve computational models of how
communicable diseases spread
– Changes in the user’s speech pattern that could be
an early indicator of a health problem
– Tell what roles people play in groups
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Business Performance Management
• Business performance management (BPM)
– Application of BI
– Enables the continuous and real-time analysis of
operational data to measure actual performance and
forecast future performance
– Creates improved feedback loops for the critical
processes of the organization
– Can be used to model work processes and predict
future performance under various what-if scenarios
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Balanced Scorecard
• Performance management tool
• Used to:
–
–
–
–
Track performance over time
Communicate and drive organizational strategy
Identify strategic initiatives
Conduct periodic performance reviews to assess if
goals are being met
• Translate an organization’s vision and strategy into
implementation activities working from:
– Financial, customer, business process, and learning
and growth perspectives
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Balanced Scorecard (continued)
• Define and monitor
– Objectives, measures, targets, and initiatives
• Key performance indicators (KPIs)
– Direction, measure, target, and time frame
• Benefits of effective use of a Balanced Scorecard
– Greater customer satisfaction
– Improved financial results
– More effective information systems and business
processes
– Motivated and better educated employees
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Balanced Scorecard (continued)
• Financial measures tend to be lag measures
– Difficult to influence directly without addressing
issues in the other three perspectives
• Customer, business, and learning and growth
measures
– Considered leading indicators of future financial
results
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Dashboards
• Digital dashboards
– Present a set of key performance indicators about
the state of a process at a specific point in time
• Options for displaying results in a dashboard
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Maps
Gauges
Bar charts
Trend lines
Scatter diagrams
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BPM Software
• Process efficiency monitoring BPM software
– Provide built-in application programming interfaces
– Connect with each of the systems that a company
uses to support a particular process
– Monitor the process to identify bottlenecks and
inefficiencies
• Workflow designer BPM software
– Design a business process complete with all of the
associated forms, business rules, role definitions,
and integration to other systems involved in the
process
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BPM Software (continued)
• Reporting and insight BPM software
– Gather data from a business process
– Provide reports and dashboards to create actionable
information
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Employing the BPM Process
• Plan-Do-Check-Act problem solving process
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Plan
Do
Check
Act
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A Manager Takes Charge: Qwest
Uses BPM Software to Improve
Operations
• Qwest Communications International, Inc. (Qwest)
– Provider of voice, data, Internet, and video services
• Qwest established a centralized BPM team
– Evaluated several BPM software packages
– Identified and evaluated possible changes in the
processes
• After implementation
– Qwest quickly experienced measurable
improvements
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Summary
• Business intelligence
– Extraction, translation, integration, analysis, and
presentation of data
– Supports improved decision making
– Extract-transform-load (ETL) process
• Business performance management
– Measures the actual performance or forecasts the
future performance of critical operations
– Balanced scorecard
– Dashboard
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