WHAT IS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE (BI)? Business Intelligence (BI) is more of a concept than a single technology.

The goal is to gain insigth into the business by bringing together data, formatting it in a way that enables better analysis, and the providing tools that give users power – not just to examine and explore the data, but to quickly understand it.
• Identifying the business problem(s) to be adressed by the warehouse and the data needed to address those problems.

• Identifying the location for all necessary data and extracting it from those sources.

• Transforming the data from various sources into consolidated, consistent data.

• Loading the transformed data into a centralized location.

• Building a data warehouse (or data mart) with the data from the centralized location. The structure being built is called a cube.

• Putting in place commercial products or custom application that give access to the data in the cubes. There are many different ways of working with cube data, and different approaches make sense for different roles within an organization.


THE CONSUMERS OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
• Business Decision-Makers

• Knowledge Workers

• Analysts

• Line Workers


DELIVERING DATA TO BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE CONSUMERS
• Business Scorecards

• Reports

• Analytic Application

• Line-of-Business Application