Business Intelligence.

Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. BI applications include the activities of  decision support systems, query  and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining.

Business intelligence applications can be:

• Mission-critical and integral to an enterprise's operations or occasional to meet a special requirement
• Enterprise-wide or local to one division, department, or project
• Centrally initiated or driven by user demand

This term was used as early as September, 1996, when a Gartner Group report said:

By 2000, Information Democracy will emerge in forward-thinking enterprises, with Business Intelligence information and applications available broadly to employees, consultants, customers, suppliers, and the public. The key to thriving in a competitive marketplace is staying ahead of the competition. Making sound business decisions based on accurate and current information takes more than intuition. Data analysis, reporting, and query tools can help business users wade through a sea of data to synthesize valuable information from it - today these tools collectively fall into a category called "Business Intelligence."

 How can we evaluate our methodology for measuring and managing business intelligence?

 By  Keith Nester

SearchDataManagement.com

How do I know if my company has a good methodology in place for measuring and managing business intelligence (BI)?

Any good methodology, whether it is for Business Intelligence, Change Management, Project Management or any other activity is simply a consistent set of standards that are understood by all stakeholders and users. These standards have to embrace both the users needs and the corporations' vision. If those two conditions are met, acceptance generally follows.

Therefore, if a methodology is a set of standards, Business Intelligence (which is a set of technology tools) must meet these eight (8) tests if it is to have a sound methodology.

1.Open standards
The ability of the tool to integrate with other tools and systems is critical. Proprietary systems don'tallow for this flexibility. Additionally, what is state of the art today, might be outdated long before you recoup your investment, or in some cases become operational (in a production mode).

2.Mission-focused design
Technology is merely a facilitator for a business problem. Therefore, what business objective the BI tool(s) are addressing must be clearly defined and agreed upon before any selection process can begin.

3.Incremental build
An incremental deployment process to build or implement a system (tool) accomplishes two critical business concerns. First, it will limit the expenditure, and limit the loss of capital, if a modular/component fashion approach is used. Second, this will allow for future expandability and component swapping if a new better "thing" comes along that will address the business question better/faster/cheaper.

4.User Involvement
Build (or buy) it and they will come doesn't work. But how often do those who will be using the system get to make the decision, as opposed to the person who has the authority to spend it. Gathering user requirements, not only will this establish project success criteria, it may also influence what type of tool(s) is (are) selected based on what the user is planning to do with the information.

5.Intuitive
The system must be intuitive to use. The only way to gather these requirements is from the user community, which will be using the technology. The challenge here is not to "over engineer" the solution.

6.Optimization
Anyone can build a "strong" bridge given enough tie and money, but the trick is can you build it "just" strong enough. Scalability and flexibility will equal balance performance. Remember that transaction-processing delays will grow exponential not geometrically as you begin to scale the system upward. In others words, processing delays will grow factor wise by 3,9,27,81, 243 (32,33,34,35) not linearly or 3,6,9,12,15 (3x2, 3x3, 3x4, 3x5). This relies heavily on #3 and 4 above.

7.Integration
Integrate old legacy systems if they contain valuable customer data. Again, this relies on #1 above and #4 for identification of what data is important.

8.Pragmatism
Avoid the philosopher's trap of building an all-encompassing Business Intelligence infrastructure. Instead, use clear models of limited scope to focus and enable specific objectives, customer processes, actions and results to build momentum. Start with finding, summarizing, interpreting and analyzing customer information that will address the most pressing business problem the business is facing. Don't try and "boil the ocean." Start with a teapot first.

From the Oracle website.

Oracle BI suite

Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite (OBIEE+ and Essbase) is a complete, open, and architecturally unified business intelligencesolution for the enterprise that delivers capabilities for reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, OLAP, dashboards, and scorecards. All enterprise data sources, as well as metrics, calculations, definitions, and hierarchies are managed in a Common Enterprise Information Model, providing users with accurate and consistent insight, regardless of where the information is consumed. Users can access and interact with information in multiple ways, including web-based interactive dashboards, collaboration workspaces, search bars, ERPand CRMapplications, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office applications.

Sometimes OBIEE is used interchangeably with Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (OBIA), which is a pre-built BI and data warehousing solution built on the OBIEE technology stack. The OBI EE Plus integrates the components of the toolset to include a service-oriented architecture, data accessservices, an analytic and calculation infrastructure, metadatamanagement services, a semantic business model, a security model and user preferences, and administration tools.

Components

Oracle BI server

An analysis server providing a calculation and aggregation engine that integrates data from multiple relational, unstructured, OLAP, and other sources.

Oracle BI Admin Tool

An administrator tool used to construct repositories consisting of a Physical Layer, Business Model and Mapping Layer, and an abstracted end-user Presentation Layer subsequently visible in BI Answers.

Oracle BI Answers

An ad-hocquery and analysis tool that processes the data from multiple data sources in a pure web environment. Users are isolated from data structurecomplexity and they view and work with a logical view of the information. Users can create interactive charts, pivot tables, reports, and dashboards. Analysis can be saved, shared, modified, formatted, or integrated in the user's dashboards.

Oracle BI Marketing

Caters to marketing needs, known as Segmentation Server.

Oracle BI Interactive Dashboards

Interactive web architecture dashboards that display required information to help users' decision making. Access to the information is interactive, based on the individual's role and identity. The end user works with live reports, charts, tables, prompts, pivot tables, and graphics and has full capability for modifying and interacting with results. Dashboards can aggregate content from other sources (e.g. the Internet, shared file servers, and document repositories).

Oracle BI Delivers

An alerting tool that provides monitoring of business activity. They are reached via multiple channels including email, dashboards, and mobile devices. It includes a web-based self-service portal where users can create and subscribe to alerts. Dashboard can initiate and pass contextual information to other alerts to execute multi-step, multi-person, and multi-application analytical workflow. It can determine recipients and personalize content to 'reach the right users at the right time with the right information'.

Oracle BI Disconnected Analytics

Offers BI Answers and Dashboards to mobile professionals on computers disconnected from the network. It provides the same interface for users whether they are working in connected or disconnected mode.

Oracle BI Publisher

A reporting engine capable of generating reports from multiple data sources in multiple formats via multiple channels.

Oracle BI Briefing Books

Reports captured series of snapshots of Oracle BI Dashboards.

Oracle BI Office Plug-In

Automatically synchronizes information from BI Answers to Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint.

Oracle Hyperion Financial Reporting

Creates book quality financial reportsin a variety of formats (including XBRL) and supports a variety of sources including Oracle's Hyperion performance managementapplications (EPM) and Oracle Essbase.

Hyperion Interactive Reporting

Pulls data together from operational or analytic sources to create charts, pivot tables, and reports and can access the Oracle BI Server semantic layer.

Hyperion SQR Production Reporting

Provides cross functional reporting from a variety of relational databasesand data sources.

Hyperion Web Analysis

Delivers out-of-the-box presentation and reporting for Oracle Essbaseand other multi-dimensional sources.