What is Business Intelligence

The term business intelligence involves the use of data in an enterprise to facilitate decision-making. It encompasses understanding the actual operation of the company. As well as the anticipation of future events, with the aim of providing knowledge to support business decisions.

Intelligence tools work on the basis of an intelligence system that is formed with different data, with information concerning various business areas.

Using the tools and techniques such as ELT (extract, load and transform), or ETL (extract, transform and load), data is extracted from different sources, cleaned and prepared (homogenization of the data) and then loaded into a data warehouse.

Life or the period of a successful business intelligence software depends upon the level of success at which the company benefits from using it. If the company is able to improve its financial and administrative decision making capacity. The business intelligence used will be retained for a long time, otherwise it will be replaced by another that provides better results.

Data warehouses are used to produce reports that answer the question "What happened?." But they can also be designed to meet the analytical question "Why does this happen?." And the prognostic question "What will happen?.'' In an operational context, they also respond to the question "What happens now?."

Reporting is probably the most widely used application of intelligence today, it enables managers to:

- Select data for such period, as production sector as customers, etc. - Sort, consolidate or distribute these data according to the criteria of their choice, - To perform various calculations (totals, averages, deviations, comparison from one period to another), - Present the results of a detailed analysis, often graphic according to their needs or expectations of company executives.

The programs used for reporting can of course be reproduced from one period according to the same selections and the same treatment. While at the same time varying certain criteria to refine the analysis. But reporting is not strictly speaking an application of decision support.

The future belongs rather to the type of instruments equipped with dashboard features like OLAP multidimensional analysis. OLAP function can be obtained in various ways such as via a relational database R-OLAP, or multidimensional OLAP-M, even as H-OLAP.

Finally, analytics tools enable the modeling of the query-based representations to create a scorecard that provides a basis for reporting.

Features

This involves a set of tools and methodologies which have the following characteristics:

- Accessibility to information; the data is the main source of the concept.

- Support for decision making. It seeks to go beyond the presentation of information so that users have access to analysis tools that allow them to select and manipulate only the data that interest them.

- Guidance to the end user. Sought independence from the expertise of users and their ability to use these tools.