What is BI –
BI is an abbreviation commonly used
for ‘Business Intelligence’ terminology. Various technical definitions are given
as –
- Business intelligence (BI) is an umbrella term that includes the applications, infrastructure and tools, and best practices that enable access to and analysis of information to improve and optimize decisions and performance. [Gartner]
- Information that makes better and smart business decisions faster with solution is Business Intelligence. [IBM]
- ‘Business intelligence (BI) is a set of theories, methodologies, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information for business purposes.’ [Wiki]
In general, BI
is helps to manage, grow business. So it can be done by understanding daily
transactions of business and obtain useful information from data. Depending on level
of business analysis is done and is provided to take decisions useful for
business.
Every business
even from smallest shop from road-corner up-to internationally well-known
brands needs the Business Intelligence; only it varies from business levels. A
very small shop-keeper can remember all his business transactions and data;
hence need not any external system to setup for business intelligence. His/her own individual (human) intelligence
is enough to manage business.
But for bigger
businesses, daily millions-trillions of transactions happens which cannot be remember
by human normally. Thus for such businesses some external system need to keep
track of all transactions and analyze.
BI presents
historical state of business, current state or predictive state of business calculated
from the past and current information. Usually BI includes Data mining, data
preprocessing, and analysis, reporting /visualization tasks.
BI application uses
data stored in data warehouses or data marts after data mining.
Some of tools
available for BI are-
Proprietary Tools – SAS, IBM Cognos, SAP BO, Microsoft BI, Oracle (OIBEE),
QlikVIew, and Tableau are some of proprietary BI tools.
Open-source
Tools – Pentaho, Jaspersoft ,SpagoBI, R, Actuate, BIRT, Weka…
