Business intelligence (BI) has four major components: a data warehouse, business analytics, business performance management and a user interface. Data warehouse and its variants is the cornerstone of any medium-to-large BI system. Originally the data warehouse included only historical data that were organized and summarized so end users could easily view or manipulate data and information. Notice that the data warehousing environment is mainly the responsibility of technical staff, while the analytic environment also known as business analytic is the realm of business users. Any user can connect to the system via the user interface such as a browser and top managers may use business performance management component and also a dashboard.
Data Warehousing
The data warehousing and its variants are the cornerstone of any medium to large business intelligence (BI) system. Originally the data warehouse included only historical data that were organized and summarized, so end users could easily view or manipulate data and information. Today, some data warehouses include current data as well so they can provide real-time decision support.
Business Analytics
Ends user can work with the data and information in a data warehouse by using a variety of tools and techniques. These tools and techniques fit into three categories:
1. Reports and queries. Business analytics include both static and dynamic reporting , all types of queries, discovery of information, multidimensional view, drill-down to details and so on.
2. Advanced analytics. Advanced analytics include many statistical, financial, mathematical and other models that are used in analyzing data and information.
3. Data, text and web mining and other sophisticated mathematical and statistical tools. Datamining is a process of searching for unknown relationships or information in large databases or data warehouses, using intelligent tools such as neural computing, predictive analytics techniques or advanced statistical methods.
Business Performance Management
Business performance management (BPM) which is also referred to as corporate performance management (CPM) is an emerging portfolio of applications and methodology that contains evolving BI architechture and tools in its core. BPM extends the monitoring, measuring and comparing of sales, profit, cost, profitability and other performance indicators by introducing the concept of management and feedback. It embraces process such as planning and forecasting as core tenets of a business strategy. In contrast with the traditional DSS, EIS and BI which support the bottom-up extraction of information from data, BPM provides a top down enforcement of corporate wide strategy.
User Interface
Dashboards provide a comprehensive visual view of corporate performance measures also known as key performance indicators, trends and exceptions. They integrate information from multiple business areas. Dashboards present graphs that show actual performance compared to desired metrics, a dashboard presents an at a glance view of the health of the organization.