Business Intelligence – The Components

In our past blogs on Business Intelligence, we discussed the signs that your organization may benefit from a BI solution and some ways that it can help your business. In order to get a better understanding of BI and the next steps, let’s take a look at what components make it up.

BI is more than just a simple query. Since the BI spectrum is extremely broad in terms of its tools and functionality, it’s important to recognize that query, reporting, and analysis are at the core of its traditional functions. To accurately and consistently consolidate data from multiple sources, BI integrates data quality functionality as a tool. Dashboards and other visualization techniques will also help you to comprehend analysis results and drill down to details, which are a critical component of the BI solution.

The main components of a BI solution that will enhance your organization’s ability to improve daily operations are:

• Enterprise reports – While most query tools provide simple reporting functionality to generate reports, enterprise or production reporting typically involves high-volume, high-resolution reports that are run on a regular basis.
• Easy-to-use Advanced Analytics – With advanced analytics functionality, you can view data across multiple dimensions in order to slice and dice it and look at various combinations. Additionally, with advanced analytics you can define hierarchies in your data so that you have the option of drilling down into finer details. These functions make it easy to compare results from one time period with another, giving you access to year-over-year comparisons at various levels.
• Visualization Techniques – Highly graphical techniques, including dashboards, strongly complement BI. With various graphical gauges, you can quickly identify certain situational conditions. Additionally, scorecards and other performance management tools enable you to establish business metrics, monitor the results, and communicate them so that problems can be addressed. Dashboards are frequently used to display performance metrics and can enable you to view multiple layers of underlying detail.
• Distribution and Control –The ability to locate and search relevant reports is a big part of the BI landscape.