Business Intelligence Tools

When contemplating business intelligence, most organizations think 'more technology', taking a very tool or application driven approach. This has historically been the typical approach for operational systems recording transactions.

Business intelligence requires a more 'information' based approach, which changes the way in which the design and build are managed. Adopting an information based approach changes the focus from tools to the business decisions that the users and stakeholders are currently making, and will need to make in the future, to manage the operation and performance of their business.

The ultimate purpose of any BI tool is to help the organization deliver improved performance. The tool itself acts purely as an enabler to provide information
to decision-makers. It is the consequent action that leads to improvement.

Business Intelligence [BI] tools include all those components, that together, provide a user with analytic capability and visual representation of enterprise data.

This includes:

• Advanced Enterprise Reporting - Broadly deployed operational reporting and scorecards/dashboards
• Cube Analysis - OLAP tools offering slice-and-dice analysis of limited data sets
• Ad Hoc Query & Analysis - investigative query into all data, as well as automated sliceand-
  dice OLAP analysis of the complete database
• Data Mining - Text Mining |
• Advanced Analytics - correlation analysis, trend analysis, financial analysis and projections. Also see Analysis Services | MS Office Excel 2007
• Difference between Standard Analytics and Advanced Analytics
• Advanced Visualisation - Scorecards | Dashboards | Portals
• Alerting & Proactive Reporting - to systems or very large populations based on schedules or event triggers in the database
• Design & Development - Dashboard Design | Using dashboards and Scorecards

Appropriate tools are a critical factor in any Performance Management System and using the right tool for the right purpose, is a key enabler.

Considering that today, the Microsoft® Excel spreadsheet is still the predominant tool, largely due to its familiarity and ease of use, it is not difficult to see that selection and implementation of new tools has many process and people change aspects.

NEXT: Advanced Enterprise Reporting

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