Business Intelligence, often known by the two letters B.I, is a hopelessly over-used term. Vendors of all types of reporting software tend to label their products BI.
The origins of the term go back to 1958, when it was defined as "the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal." But that was years ago!
The term was resurrected in 1989 to mean "concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems”, but did not become popular until the late 1990s. With so many terms from this era already consigned to the history books, BI’s longevity follows its appeal to the emotions.
Reporting and forecasting systems became “intelligent” with the advent of analytical systems that could make sense of the multi-dimensional world of products, territories, customers, salespeople, groupings and time periods. These are often referred to as OLAP systems (OnLine Analytical Processing, as distinct from OnLine Transactional Processing).
Whilst there are various types of OLAP systems (MOLAP, ROLAP, HOLAP, WOLAP, DOLAP etc), the use of multi-dimensional “cubes” of information is the essence of making sense out of the jumble of data typically found in transactional systems.
Future articles will explore BI in all its glory!
BI is a widely-used term, but in practice it is mainly used as follows:
ReplyDeleteBusiness Intelligence (“BI”) aims to make sense of the thousands or millions of transactions that are processed by and recorded on ERP/accounting systems such as Sage, SAP, Exchequer, Microsoft Dynamics etc.
The transactions most commonly analysed are invoices or orders.
BI makes sense of these transactions by SUMMARISING them, the most common means of doing this being an Excel pivot table.
Click here to see a 90 second demonstration I did of how a pivot table summarises 4000 sales invoices issued over a 3 month period by an IT sales company.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAwsXZOndQ4