What is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence allows people at all levels of an organization to access, interact with, and analyze data to manage the business, improve performance, discover opportunities, and operate efficiently.
–Cindi Howson
Business Intelligence (BI) is NOT about delivering access to a massive repository of data, often unconstrained and overwhelming. BI is about delivering highly relevant, highly targeted, highly valuable applications, reports, dashboards, and scorecards designed to maximize the user’s ability to gain specific, actionable knowledge from corporate data. This requires:
- Data Strategy
- Vision: The goals of business intelligence within the organization, clearly defined and documented and culturally socialized. Here we explicitly require of our data the knowledge necessary to advanced the vision and goals of the business.
- Success Criteria: The definition of success must be clearly understood.
- Key Performance Indicators: The measurement by which to know if progress toward success is being achieved.
- Data Governance
- People: The right staff in place, trained, knowledgeable, capable, passionate–with the vision and commitment of executive management to support them.
- Process: The right activities supporting the care and feeding of the data warehouse, the effective execution of a BI initiative, and appropriate understanding of the data created by your business processes.
- Policies: The right protective gates and gatekeepers to support the creation and maintenance of data–ensuring quality, correctness, and commonality of definitions within the enterprise.
- Data Architecture: The right model (logical and physical) for our data–highly-specialized, flexible, optimized for analytical analysis–and the infrastructure necessary to allow it to achieve the goals of the business.
- Technology: The right tools in place to make the access to valuable knowledge intuitive and effective.
A Representative Architecture
The following is a simple, representative architectural diagram for a data warehouse ecosystem. Business intelligence involves the practices and principles (many described above) to create the system this basic diagram represents.
A Simple, Representative BI Architecture
