Business Intelligence for competitive advantage
In the beginning, businesses used information technology for automating the processes primarily to reduce labor costs. Subsequently, information technology is used for delivering information with speed and accuracy.
Currently, businesses want to use the information effectively for competitive advantage to make better decisions that improve and optimize business processes, predict the market dynamics accurately, optimize forecasts to adequately maintain resources to name a few reasons.
Businesses reached a critical juncture in global competition and the business intelligence capabilities and analytic prowess will play critical roles in the most competitive sectors of global economy.
First of all, business intelligence analysis requires the capturing of information and storing in a single location for effective data analysis. Currently, data analysis is supported by transactional systems, business specific data marts, and other ad-hoc processes. Information is distributed making it difficult and time-consuming to access. Business teams have adapted to this environment by creating user maintained databases and manual “work-arounds” to support new types of reporting and analysis. This has resulted in inconsistent data, redundant data storage, significant resource use for maintenance, and inefficient response to changing business needs.
A data warehouse comprised of disparate data sources enables the “single version of truth” through shared data repositories and standards and also provides access to the data that will expand frequency and depth of data analysis. Due to these reasons, data warehouse is the foundation for business intelligence.
As a Technical Architect, I am involved in the design and development of the Enterprise Data Warehouse at Target. I and many of my colleagues worked hard to make the business case of the importance of the data warehouse and its value addition to the company.
Smith, W., & Jewett, D. (2009). Tableau software and teradata database the visual approach to the active data warehouse. In Retrieved from http://www.tableausoftware.com/learn/whitepapers
On the output side of the data warehouse, there must be interfaces that allow a user to ask for data from the devices (PCs or terminals) that he typically use. The information in the warehouse must be structured, so that users can easily obtain answers to their questions.
In today’s organizational structure many of the organizations realize that business intelligence (BI) can provide solutions and important competitive advantages and thus want to evolve their BI strategies beyond spreadsheets.
For TWR, I architected and delivered scalable robust Business Intelligence platform to perform analytics on terabytes of retail data gathered from various resources incorporating convoluted security requirements.The platform was the most extensively used application by TWR executives, sales and marketing professionals
Ans: When a data mart replaces data warehouse, data marts can be used for analysis purposes and it would be much less expensive to work with data mart but then they can be used only for specific business unit or department. When a data mart is used to complement a data warehouse it has the benefit of using the consis...
Business intelligence (BI) is the process of gathering enough of the right information in the right manner at the right time, and delivering the right results to the right people for decision-making purposes so that it can continue to yield real business benefits, or have a positive impact on business strategy, tactics, and operations in the enterprises. Business intelligence is a well-established and generally well-known software category that spans a wide range of functional capabilities. Business Intelligence systems are one step above knowledge management systems. Although sspecific definitions will vary from customer to customer and vendor to vendor, but most will agree that business intelligence typically refers to the challenge of providing business users with meaningful information from company data sources to help those users make better, more informed business decisions. BI applications include activities of online analytical processing (OLAP), decision support systems (DSS), data warehousing and data mining. Business Intelligence includes the following functions:
Companies are able to become analytic competitors through various activities. One of the first steps to becoming a competitor is the widespread use of modeling and optimization. Instead of following basic statistical information, it is wise to look for ways to enhance profitability. To become successful at this, organizations use both internal and external information retrieved from outside sources for a vivid understanding of their consumers. Secondly, an enterprise approach is necessary. Through this approach, employees become proactive at finding out what items or processes are effective. A good example would be of how the article talks about UPS’s approach for assessing problems,” The UPS Customer Intelligence G...
The last decade can be marked as a period of significant changes in the business world. Being accustomed to utilize computers as a powerful tool with its office applications such as Microsoft Word and Excel. In the 1990s office workers first faced the opportunity to share information using the Internet (McNurlin, 2009). However, the situation became even more different with the transition to the third millennium. With a further development of information technologies, the majority of big enterprises had to reconstitute their business processes and to make the transition to the Internet economy. Enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply-chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM) software and the variety of other information systems became essential components of the new economy. It can be expected, that all these complex solutions were designed to bring great benefits for different sides of the corporate activity, in particular, decisions made by top-managers are expected to become nearer to the ideal, customer service is to be improved and collaboration more prolific. Nevertheless, to ensure the desired results it should be taken into account that the key concept of these reorganizations is an information or a data, dealing with which can be a serious issue, and wide utilizing of the data warehouses in contemporary organizations confirms this fact.
Arguments in which data warehouse architecture is best among consultants and vendors never cease since each one of them claims that the architecture they use ...
Business intelligence is a technological process enabling users to present the maximum of data in order to make better decisions. Its advantage is to present all sorts of information coming both internal and external sources combined into dashboard that would raise the level of information during the decision making process.
Business Intelligence (BI). BI manipulates numerous variables from different sources to help decisions be properly made with the right data to back it up. For example, the cost accountant may use information from the logistics department, weather
For the past couple of decades the majority of businesses have wanted to construct a data-driven organization or company. Furthermore, companies around the world are considering harnessing data as a basis of competitive advantage over other companies. As a result, business intelligence and data science use are popular in many organizations today. The increase in adoption of these data systems is in response to the heavy rise in communications abilities the world over. Which, in turn ,has increased the need for data products. Indeed, the Data Scientist profession is emerging to be one of the better-paying professions due to the urgent need of their labor. This paper is going to discuss what business intelligence is all about and explain data science that is usually confused to be similar to business intelligence. I will tackle a brief overview of data scientists and their role in organizations.
Databases are becoming as common in the workplace as the stapler. Businesses use databases to keep track of payroll, vacations, inventory, and a multitude of other taske of which are to vast to mention here. Basically businesses use databases anytime a large amount of data must be stored in such a manor that it can easily be searched, categorized and recalled in different means that can be easily read and understood by the end user. Databases are used extensively where I work. In fact, since Hyperion Solutions is a database and financial intelligence software developing company we produce one. To keep the material within scope I shall narrow the use of databases down to what we use just in the Orlando office of Hyperion Solutions alone.
Data Warehousing – This comprehensive database is used for reporting and data analysis. The information is uploaded from a separate operational system.
Business intelligence, or BI, is an umbrella term that refers to a variety of software applications used to analyze an organization’s raw data. BI as a discipline is made up of several related activities, including data mining, online analytical processing, querying and reporting. Data mining is the process of sorting through large amounts of data and picking out relevant information. It is usually used by business intelligence organizations, and financial analysts, but is increasingly being used in the sciences to extract information from the enormous data sets generated by modern experimental and observational methods.