1. Introduction to Business Intelligence

2. Changing Business Environments and Computerized Decision Support
The Business Pressures-Responses-Support Model
The business environment
Organizational responses: be reactive, anticipative, adaptive, and proactive
Computerized support
Closing the Strategy Gap One of the major objectives of BI is to facilitate closing the gap between the current performance of an organization and its desired performance as expressed in its mission, objectives, and goals and the strategy for achieving them

3. Changing Business Environments and Computerized Decision Support

4. Managerial Decision Making
Businesses are always fraught with challenges
Managers must make decisions almost on a daily basis
Many of those decisions have significant financial and organizational impact
Examples:
What tools can we use to make the decisions efficiently (not waste too much time and resources) and more effective (have greater impact on the final outcome)
Get examples through think pair share.

5. Decision Making Process
Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon postulated that rational decision maker goes through the following stages:

6. Systems Prior to BI Decision Support Systems Statistical Tools
Mainly model based. Supports the design part with limited support for the choice part of decision making
Statistical Tools
More data oriented. Provides data descriptions and insight into the data.
Data Mining
Specialized data analysis tools for structured data analysis
Knowledge Management
Tools for capturing and managing knowledge. Can be considered as pre-cursor to BI

7. Business Intelligence (BI)
A conceptual framework for an integrated decision support environment. It combines architecture, databases (or data warehouse), analytical and visual presentation tools.
The success of a BI solution ultimately is determined by how well it helps both business and technical users throughout an organization meet their mission critical goals.

8. The 5 Stages of Business Intelligence
BI development typically follows the 5 stages listed below:
1. The Data: defining which data will be loaded into the system and analyzed.
2. The ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) Engine: moving the source data to the Data Warehouse. This can be a complex step involving modifications and calculations on the data itself. If this step doesn’t work properly, the BI solution simply cannot be effective.
3. Data Warehousing: connects electronic data from different operational systems so that the data can be queried and analyzed over time for business decision making.
4. Analytic Engine: analyzes multidimensional data sets found in a data warehouse to identify trends, outliers, and patterns.
5. Presentation Layer: the dashboards, reports and alerts that present findings from the analysis.

9. A Framework for Business Intelligence (BI)

10. BI Components Data Warehouses and Data Mining
A class of information analysis based on databases that looks for hidden patterns in a collection of data which can be used to predict future behavior
Business (or corporate) Performance Management (BPM)
A component of BI based on the balanced scorecard methodology, which is a framework for defining, implementing, and managing an enterprise’s business strategy by linking objectives with factual measures
Dashboards
A visual presentation of critical data for executives to view. It allows executives to see hot spots in seconds and explore the situation

11. Business Intelligence: A Confluence of Tools and Capabilities
The three circles of the Venn diagram each represent (previously considered) distinct areas of study and application:
1. information systems and technology,
2. statistics, and
3. OR/MS.
BI can be described as a combination of : business information intelligence (BII), business statistical intelligence (BSI) and business modeling intelligence (BMI).
BI must provide an integrated capabilities for decision making and those include capabilities for
Collection
Description
Prescription
Interpretation

12. BI vs. Business Analytics
Used often interchangeably in the present business environment
Analytics is more tools oriented, so it mainly refers to the technology for BI
BI is more of the umbrella term that also includes the business side of the equation
BI is more of a planning level concept and BA is more of an implementation level concept
If you think of KPI (Key Performance Indicators), BI defines them while BA measures them (roughly speaking)
Google Analytics: BI or BA?

13. Major BI Vendors List obtained from: Leading Vendors are: Actuate
Leading Vendors are:
Actuate
Cognos
Information Builders
Microsoft
MicroStrategy
Oracle
Panorama
QlikTech
SAP
SAS
Go to the website listed above, and then investigate the strengths and weaknesses of the BI products from each of the vendors and create a 2-4 page comparison report. Identify also the major area of thrust for each of the vendors

14. Challenges for BI Implementation
Multi-process, multi-users environment
The Typical BI User Community
IT staff
Power users
Executives
Functional managers
Occasional information customers
Partners
Consumers

15. Challenges for BI Implementation
Lack of a Complete and Integrated Single Vendor Solution
Some progress are being made though with SaaS model and In-Memory BI

16. Challenges for BI Implementation
Lack of integration with Organizational Strategy
BI is viewed more as a technology than an organizational process change and strategic initiative
Lack of data standardization
Rapidly growing volume of data
Rapidly changing technology
Need for specialized knowledge and training
Security and legal issues associated with information access and use

17. BI Governance BI Governance consists of
The project prioritization process within organizations
Creating categories of projects (investment, business opportunity, strategic, mandatory, etc.
Defining criteria for project selection
Determining and setting a framework for managing project risk
Managing and leveraging project interdependencies
Continually monitoring and adjusting the composition of the portfolio
Intelligence Gathering that involves how modern companies ethically and legally organize themselves to glean as much information as they can from their:
Customers
Business environment
Stakeholders
Business processes
Competitors
Other sources of potentially valuable information
Setting processes instead of just solutions

18. BI Governance

19. Strategic, Tactical & Functional Benefits of Business Intelligence