INDEX

Serial Page Topics

no. no.
1 4 Introduction to
Business Intelligence

2 6 The five key stages of Business Intelligence

3 10 Need of Business Intelligence

4 13 A Survey on Arising Need of

Business Intelligence

5 15 Business Intelligence Architecture

6 19 Four Key Features of Business Intelligence Architecture

7 20 Attributes of enterprise-scale Business Intelligence architecture

8 22 The Benefits of Business Intelligence

9 25 Business Intelligence top 10 benefits

10 30 Summary
 Introduction to Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) refers to computer-based techniques

used in spotting, digging-out, and analyzing business data, such
as sales revenue by products or departments or associated costs
and incomes.

Business Intelligence is the business capability of extracting

actionable insight from business and market data to support
better decision making and improved corporate performance.

Common functions of Business intelligence technologies are

reporting, Data mining, Business Performance Management,
Analytics and Predictive Analytics.

Business Intelligence (BI) is smart software package supporting

the business decision making process. This package helps in
gathering, analyzing and presenting business information. Its
data-driven intelligent business solutions are used in the
Decision Support Systems (DSS).

Business intelligence (BI) is a business management term,

which refers to applications and technologies that are used to
gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information
about company operations and performance.It will also provide
for:
• Less data redundancy
• Improved data inaccuracy
• Increased access to FTB Data
• More efficient use of taxpayer and third party information
• More consistent treatment across debt types.

Business intelligence equips enterprises to gain business

advantage from data. Once an organization is powered with BI it
can anticipate enhanced turnaround time on data collection,
come up with fresh ideas for novel business initiatives, foresee
accurate picture of customer needs and demands, and perform
more targeted marketing campaigns.

Business intelligence is rated as the most wanted technology by

businesses across the world. Even in current times of economic
downturn, when IT budgets are being cut, BI is still at the top of
the list of urgently needed business capabilities.
 The five key stages of Business
Intelligence

The business Intelligence consists of Five Stages .i.e. Data

Analysis, Situation Awareness, Risk Assessment, Decision
Support. The details of stages each stages are as follows:

Extracting electronic information

from text documents, databases,
images, media files and web pages.

Synthesising useful knowledge from

collected data using data mining, text
understanding and image analysis
techniques.

Linking the useful facts and

inferences and filtering out irrelevant
information.

Identifying reasonable decisions or

courses of action based on the
expectation of risk and reward.

Employing semi-interactive software

to identify good decisions and
strategies.
1. Data sourcing:

Business Intelligence is about extracting information from

multiple sources of data. The data might be: text documents
- e.g. memos or reports or email messages; photographs
and images; sounds; formatted tables; web pages and URL
lists. The key to data sourcing is to obtain the information
in electronic form. So typical sources of data might include:
scanners; digital cameras; database queries; web searches;
computer file access; etcetera.

2. Data analysis:

Business Intelligence is about synthesizing useful

knowledge from collections of data. It is about estimating
current trends, integrating and summarizing disparate
information, validating models of understanding, and
predicting missing information or future trends. This
process of data analysis is also called data mining or
knowledge discovery.
3. Situation awareness:

Business Intelligence is about filtering out irrelevant

information, and setting the remaining information in the
context of the business and its environment. The user needs
the key items of information relevant to his or her needs,
and summaries that are syntheses of all the relevant data
(market forces, government policy etc.).  Situation
awareness is the grasp of the context in which to
understand and make decisions.  Algorithms for situation
assessment provide such syntheses automatically.

4. Risk Assessment:

Business Intelligence is about discovering what plausible

actions might be taken, or decisions made, at different
times. It is about helping you weigh up the current and
future risk, cost or benefit of taking one action over
 another, or making one decision versus another. It is about
inferring and summarizing your best options or choices.

5. Decision support:

Business Intelligence is about using information wisely.  It

aims to provide warning you of important events, such as
takeovers, market changes, and poor staff performance, so
that you can take preventative steps. It seeks to help you
analyse and make better business decisions, to improve
sales or customer satisfaction or staff morale. It presents the
information you need, when you need it

Need of Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is today's tech priority for a reason .i.e.
Information is growing at an exponential rate.

As information grows, the need for organizations to manage it

and make it actionable grows as well. Getting that information
in a timely manner—and to the right people in the right places,
throughout an organization—is an important means to enterprise
success.

The need of Business intelligence can be categorized into the

following categories:

1. Business operations reporting

The most common form of business intelligence is business

operations reporting. This includes the actuals and how the
actuals stack up against the goals. This type of business
intelligence often manifests itself in the standard weekly or
monthly reports that need to be produced.

2. Forecasting
Many of you have no doubt run into the needs for forecasting,
and all of you would agree that forecasting is both a science and
an art. It is an art because one can never be sure what the future
holds. What if competitors decide to spend a large amount of
money in advertising? What if the price of oil shoots up to $80 a
barrel? At the same time, it is also a science because one can
extrapolate from historical data, so it's not a total guess.

3. Dashboard

The primary purpose of a dashboard is to convey the

information at a glance. For this audience, there is little, if any,
need for drilling down on the data. At the same time,
presentation and ease of use are very important for a dashboard
to be useful.

After creating dashboard page, you can customize it by adding

or removing components, such as excel wed access and key
performance indicators(KPI)

4. Multidimensional analysis
Multidimensional analysis is the "slicing and dicing" of the data.
It offers good insight into the numbers at a more granular level.
This requires a solid data warehousing / data mart backend, as
well as business-savvy analysts to get to the necessary data.

5. Finding correlation among different factors

This is diving very deep into business intelligence. Questions

asked are like, "How do different factors correlate to one
another?" and "Are there significant time trends that can be
leveraged/anticipated?"

Business Intelligence is a process for increasing the competitive

advantage of a business by intelligent use of available data in
decision making. Dashboards can also help to present, view,
and understand the trends relate to various aspects
 A Survey on Arising Need of
Business Intelligence

Information contained in enterprises worldwide is expected to

reach 120,000 petabytes in year 2010, according to a new survey
by IDC (a sister company to CIO's publisher). The study,
commissioned by Teradata, surveyed 1,072 line-of-business
executives and IT professionals in 22 countries.

Here's a snapshot of today's information management needs,

according to the survey:

 The amount of information is growing rapidly. Eighty-

one percent of respondents say the amount of information
available with which to make decisions has "grown
significantly" or "increased a lot."
 We've reached information overload. Seventy-five
percent report feeling overloaded with information, and 40
percent rated their degree of being overwhelmed at 4 on a 5
point scale.
 The need for timely information is more pressing. A
third of respondents said access to up-to-date information
within seconds or hours is critical to their companies.
 Accessing unstructured information is difficult but
increasingly necessary to decision making. Fifty-five
percent of the information dealt with in decision making is
unstructured—for example, e-mails, documents, or images
—yet two-thirds of respondents use mostly manual methods
to search and access such data.
 To manage the avalanches of information, business
intelligence tools are becoming more widespread. No
longer the sole domain of analytical experts in headquarters,
single departments or applications, business analytics are
used by front-line workers, multiple departments and by
users outside the organization. Forty-eight percent of
respondents said their front-line staff—call center, bank
tellers, and so on—are making more decisions than last
year, and 54 percent said front-line staff had business
intelligence solutions to support them. And 24 percent of
respondents allow customers to access their business
intelligence applications, 21 percent allow suppliers, and 20
percent distributors.
 Timely business intelligence has become mission critical
to many enterprises. Sixty-four percent of respondents said
that if a business intelligence system was down one day or
less, they expected a materially negative impact to business
operations. Twenty-one percent said negative results would
come from a downtime of one hours or less.
 Business Intelligence Architecture

An effective business intelligence architecture is designed

to meet the demands of enterprise-scale IT environments
and the needs of business users.

An effective architecture must provide a full range of business

intelligence capabilities to solve real business problems across
the organization without creating new ones. This means
providing the right kind of information in the right way to
different user communities, and providing them with self-serve
capabilities so that they do not overburden IT.
Wiki has two sites in library. These op=pages are home page
and hew to use home page. . this page contain information and
and how to us that information.
A blog site is created to share personal insights, events, news,
records, and anything wishful with individuals and groups.

To maximize the benefits of BI, companies require ease of

deployment, use, and integration. Once the solution is deployed,
IT must be able to manage it effectively. This means having
visibility into the system to enable IT to manage proactively,
identifying potential issues before they become problems and
maintaining optimal system performance.
In contrast, a modern architecture is based on open
standards, which provides greater flexibility. Modern
standards are today defined by their design and construction
using Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles and
modern web services technologies.

Business Intelligence Architecture Strengths at a Glance:

 Great interoperability and compatibility with standard
platforms and tools
 Leverage existing IT infrastructure and technologies.
 Highly Scalable to meet your growing demands
 Secure, Compatible with user authentication directory
systems.
 Minimum Training requirements for even non-technical
users
 Supports internationalization
Example of the NIH IT Enterprise Architecture Framework, where
the Business architecture is pictured as part of the enterprise
architecture.
 Unified, Proven Enterprise Business Intelligence Architecture

Four Key Features of Business

Intelligence Architecture

1. Simple Integration and Deployment:

Industry standard enterprise business intelligence
architecture, ensuring interoperability and compatibility
with your existing platforms and systems

2. High Performance and Scalable:

Consistent high performance in an easy, integrated business
intelligence platform for all users. Scalable, load balancing
to support elevated data volumes and applications,
increasing user base and user needs

3. Secure and Centralized Administration:

Easy, centralized, browser-based administration helps
manage the metadata layer, data access, security, and user
 group administration.

4. Minimum Training:
Robust, flexible with integrated enterprise reporting,
analysis and query eliminate the need to learn multiple
products.
Less training requirements resulting in better user take up
and participation across all levels in the organisation
 Attributes of enterprise-scale Business
Intelligence architecture

These requirements are fundamental to business intelligence

systems that will be deployed broadly across the organization,
and all of these are delivered largely through the underlying
architecture:

Usability:
To reach the broadest possible audience, a BI solution has
to recognize and accommodate different types of users
through a common user experience, across all BI capabilities
and on the full range of technology, including mobile devices.
It must be
highly searchable so that users can leverage BI information
that the organization has already created.

Common business view:

For organizations with many data assets, applications, and
users, it’s critical that a BI solution delivers a common view
of the business—so managers and knowledge workers never
have to worry about the validity of their numbers versus
others. The single view must be based on all the data, and the
quality of the data must be maintained to ensure user
confidence. Data modelers must be able to create an effective
business model quickly, and readily modify it as the needs of
business change over time.
 Scalability:
Enterprise BI deployments have to scale to thousands and
tens of thousands of users across a global organization, and
they must scale in a linear fashion.

Reliability:
For most organizations, business intelligence is core to the
running of the business or department. A BI system has to
operate on a 24x7 basis, with redundancy for all capabilities
and services.

Openness:
Businesses intelligence has to be open—in terms of the data
you can access, and for integration with existing and new
applications, portals, security systems, and more.

Manageability:
IT must be able to administer efficiently and proactively,
ensuring that potential problems are identified early and
avoided, and keeping the system operating effectively.

Security:
A BI solution has to work with existing security providers
to ensure that access to both the BI system and the
information in that system is always secured as required.
 The Benefits of Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence systems allow organizations to

improve business performance by leveraging information
about customers, suppliers, and internal business
operations. BI systems:

 Extract data from many sources, such as Customer

Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain
Management (SCM), and Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP) systems, and other applications.
 Centralize, organize, and standardize information in
repositories, such as data warehouses and data marts.
This may also involve cleaning the data and
appending additional data.
Although there could be many factors that could affect the
implementation process of a BI system, following are the
critical success factors for business intelligence
implementation:

a. Business-driven methodology & project management

b. Clear vision & planning
c. Committed management support & sponsorship
d. Data management & quality
e. Mapping solutions to user requirements
f. Performance considerations of the BI system
g. Robust & expandable framework

Business Intelligence is, according to many analysts, the

number one area for investment by IT Directors. Business
Intelligence, when properly implemented and used,
delivers many benefits. Some of the key advantages
include:

 Alignment of an organisation around a consistent set

of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Metrics.
 Quicker, fact-based decision making

 Simplified graphical presentation of KPIs and metrics

 Reliable presentation of information (‘One version of

the truth’)

 Combination of multiple data sources (ERP, CRM,

Spreadsheets, Budgets...)

 Faster collection and dissemination of information

 Business Intelligence top 10 benefits

Microsoft Business Intelligence, a fully integrated suite of

server, client, and developer products thoroughly
integrated with the 2007 Microsoft Office system,
delivers the right information, at the right time, and in the
right format. Business Intelligence presents easy-to-use
information directly to people where they work,
collaborate, and make decisions. Here are the top 10 ways
Business Intelligence can help you increase results by
delivering business intelligence throughout your
organization.

Connect people to information efficiently and

effectively.

Business Intelligence makes it easy for decision-

makers to access and analyze information anytime,
anywhere. Up-to-date information is available where
people work, collaborate, and make decisions,
whether it's on the desktop or over the Web.

Empower employees.
When analytical data is readily available and
understandable, your employees can more easily act
in ways that improve performance and support the
overall business strategy. Business Intelligence
includes robust, dynamic business score carding,
analysis, and reporting tools so everyone throughout
the company can make better decisions, faster.

Simplify collaboration and sharing.

Improve organizational effectiveness using Microsoft

business intelligence and collaboration technologies.
Tight integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint
Server 2007 enables you to easily share information
in a security-enhanced, managed web environment
with your colleagues, customers, and partners. Now
you have a central location to monitor your KPIs,
access reports, analyze your data as well as share
documents, chat live and link to relevant subject
matter.

Analyze and gain insight.

The 2007 Microsoft Office system, fully integrated

with Microsoft SQL Server 2008, enables people to
gain insight using familiar, easy-to-use tools powered
by a proven, scalable Business Intelligence platform.
When information is accessible and easy to interact
with — adding data to analyze, doing calculations,
and drilling into more detail — people are better able
to analyze and evaluate information and then make
well-informed, insightful business decisions.

Improve alignment.

Business Intelligence improves alignment throughout

your organization. Articulate strategy, set objectives,
monitors performance, perform group analysis, and
then make informed decisions that support your
overall business strategy. Managers can easily
establish lines of responsibility on a strategy map and
employees can align their objectives with corporate
goals.

Harness the power of the 2007 Microsoft Office

system.

Enhancements include increased capacity for

interactive analysis in Office Excel 2007 for search,
delivery, and collaboration in Microsoft Office
SharePoint Server 2007, and improved visualization
technology across the Microsoft Office suites.
Business Intelligence is also integrated with SQL
Server 2008 Reporting Services and SQL Server 2008
Analysis Services — industry leading business
intelligence platform technology — which enhances
the power of the information delivered to the desktop.

Deliver business intelligence to your entire

organization.

Business Intelligence supports the breadth of your

organization's business intelligence needs. Strategic
planning is simpler when using familiar tools;
information management is easier in a centralized and
fully integrated BI environment; and development is
more cost-effective when using an industry-standard
development environment. With the familiar user
interface of the Microsoft Office system, the SQL
Server 2008 business intelligence platform behind the
scenes, and custom development through Microsoft
Visual Studio, Business Intelligence supports
everyone — information workers, IT professionals,
and developers — in your organization.

Reduce training needs.

With Business Intelligence, people in your

organization can interact with data where they want
— in the 2007 Microsoft Office system. By using
tools that are familiar, accessible, and widely
supported, you lower training costs and significantly
shorten the learning curve.
Deliver sophisticated analysis and reporting.

Rich scorecard functionality, supported by reports,

charts, graphs, and analysis, means that employees
can readily track key performance indicators (KPIs)
against key business goals. Understanding and
analyzing the relationships between KPIs and your
corporate objectives means you gain a better
understanding of how your business is performing
today, not at the end of the month, quarter, or year,
when it is too late to act and impact performance.

Deliver enterprise-grade business intelligence.

With the complete and fully integrated platform

backed by SQL Server 2008, Business Intelligence
delivers extract-transform-load functionality (ETL),
online analytical processing (OLAP), data mining,
predictive analysis, and reporting, all in one. Fully
scalable, Business Intelligence delivers power,
stability, enhanced security, and low total cost of
ownership (TCO).
 Summary

Business Intelligence (BI) is much more than software and

describes a set of processes and technologies for simplifying and
enhancing the use of information within a Company. In BI data
is gathered from the IT systems in a company, whether they be
ERP or CRM systems, or from Excel spreadsheets and other
personal productivity tools. Data is cleaned, standardised and
then presented to business users in a friendly way.

Information in BI is displayed using dashboards and scorecards,

explored using ‘slice and dice’ techniques and experimented on
with data mining and forecasting tools.

In business Intelligence Combining plan and actual information

allows a performance management framework to be built, with
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics disseminated
throughout the organisation.

Business Intelligence is an umbrella term, which encompasses a

vast array of other terms coined by consultants over the years
such as Performance Management, Executive Dashboards, Data
Warehouse, Scorecards. Here we will focus on the major benefit
of alignment.

BI is often thought of as a software solution. However modern

software is relatively easy to implement, allowing the focus to
shift to the more important areas of process design and
implementation.

Business intelligence is rated as the most wanted technology by

businesses across the world. Even in current times of economic
downturn, when IT budgets are being cut, BI is still at the top of
the list of urgently needed business capabilities. Business
Intelligence systems allow you to uncover, analyze, and forecast
the trends that drive your business.