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BI BUSINESS PROCESSES Organizations typically gather information in order to Assess The Business Environment , and cover fields such as Marketing Research , Industry Or Market Research , and Competitor Analysis . Competitive organizations accumulate business intelligence in order to gain Sustainable Competitive Advantage , and may regard such intelligence as a valuable Core Competence in some instances. Generally, BI-collectors glean their primary information from internal business sources. Such sources help decision-makers understand how well they have performed. Secondary sources of information include Customer needs, customer decision-making processes, the Competition and competitive pressures, conditions in relevant industries, and general Economic , Technological , and Cultural Trend s. Industrial Espionage may also provide business intelligence by using covert techniques. A Gray Area exists between "normal" business intelligence and industrial espionage. Each business intelligence system has a specific goal, which derives from an Organizational Goal or from a Vision Statement . Both short-term goals (such as quarterly numbers to Wall Street ) and long term goals (such as Shareholder Value , target Industry Share / size, etc.) exist . BI TECHNOLOGY Some observers regard BI as the process of enhancing Data into Information and then into Knowledge . Persons involved in business intelligence processes may use Application Software and other technologies to gather, store, analyze, and provide access to Data , and present that data in a simple, useful manner. The software aids in Business Performance Management , and aims to help people make "better" Business decisions by making accurate, current, and relevant information available to them when they need it. Some people use the term "BI" interchangeably with "briefing books" or with " Executive Information System s", and the information that they contain. In this sense, one can regard a business intelligence system as a Decision-support System (DSS). BI software types People working in business intelligence have developed tools that ease the work, especially when the intelligence task involves gathering and Analyzing large quantities of unstructured Data . Each Vendor typically defines Business Intelligence their own way, and markets tools to do BI the way that they see it. Business intelligence includes tools in various categories, including the following:
HISTORY An early reference to non-business intelligence occurs in Sun Tzu 's '' The Art Of War ''. Sun Tzu claims that to succeed in war, one should have full knowledge of one's own strengths and weaknesses and full knowledge of one's enemy's strengths and weaknesses. Lack of either one might result in defeat. A certain school of thought draws parallels between the challenges in business and those of war, specifically:
Prior to the start of the Information Age in the late 20th Century , businesses sometimes struggled to collect data from non-automated sources. Businesses then lacked the computing resources to properly analyze the data, and often made business decisions primarily on the basis of Intuition . As businesses started automating more and more systems, more and more data became available. However, collection remained a challenge due to a lack of infrastructure for data exchange or to incompatibilities between systems. Analysis of the data that was gathered and reports on the data sometimes took months to generate. Such reports allowed informed long-term strategic decision-making. However, short-term tactical decision-making continued to rely on intuition. In modern businesses, increasing standards, automation, and technologies have led to vast amounts of data becoming available. Data Warehouse technologies have set up repositories to store this data. Improved Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) and even recently Enterprise Application Integration tools have increased the speedy collecting of data. OLAP reporting technologies have allowed faster generation of new reports which analyze the data. Business intelligence has now become the art of sieving through large amounts of data, extracting pertinent information, and turning that information into knowledge upon which actions can be taken. Business intelligence software incorporates the ability to data mine, analyze, and reporting. Some modern BI software allow users to cross-analyze and perform deep data research rapidly for better analysis of sales or performance on an individual, department, or company level. In modern applications of business intelligence software, managers are able to quickly compile reports from data for forecasting, analysis, and business decision making. In 1989 Howard Dresner , a Research Fellow at Gartner Group popularized "BI" as a umbrella term to describe a set of concepts and methods to improve business decision-making by using fact-based support systems. Dresner left Gartner in 2005 and joined Hyperion Solutions as its Chief Strategy Officer . KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS BI often uses Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to assess the present state of business and to prescribe a course of action. More and more organizations have started to make more data available more promptly. In the past, data only became available after a month or two, which did not help managers to adjust activities in time to hit Wall Street targets. Recently, banks have tried to make data available at shorter intervals and have reduced delays. The KPI methodology was further expanded with the Chief Performance Officer methodology which incorporated KPIs and root cause analysis into a single methodology. KPI example For example, for businesses which have higher operational/ Credit Risk Loading (for example, Credit Card s and "wealth management"), a large multi-national bank makes KPI-related data available weekly, and sometimes offers a daily analysis of numbers. This means data usually becomes available within 24 hours, necessitating automation and the use of IT System s. DESIGNING AND IMPLEMENTING A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE PROGRAMME When implementing a BI programme one might like to pose a number of questions and take a number of resultant decisions, such as:
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