CHAPTER1

INTRODUCTION

1.1E-INTELLIGENCE
E-Intelligence is the adding of intelligence to electronic data. It represents the creation of knowledge from the information flowing into the firm from its web-based and traditional systems. E-Intelligence is an overarching concept that allows companies to customize and enhance personalized relationships with customers and suppliers and improve the effectiveness and profitability of business processes and operations via the Internet and traditional channels. Business intelligence tools technology that allows decision makers in an organization to access, analyze, and share corporate information-business applications using the internet as the basis for interacting with customers, suppliers, and other business partners. These two technologies combine to form e-business intelligence applications, i.e. customers, suppliers, and partners of an organization access and analyze information stored in its corporate databases. The final insight we gained was that e-intelligence is about intelligence first and e second. The firms that were most comfortable with the idea of e-intelligence and its potential were firms that not only already knew what they wanted to get from their data systems but had an idea of what they would want to achieve if there were no constraints. In other words, these firms had a clear, unconstrained strategy aimed at extracting the most value from their economic interactions with partners and customers. If anything they were waiting for the technology to catch up with their imagination. Firms that were struggling with e-intelligence initiatives were those that were allowing the technology to decide where they needed to go. As such, they were more likely to be befuddled by the options being presented to them by technology suppliers and were much more reactive to customer demands and competitors initiatives. E-intelligence systems provide internal business users, trading partners, and corporate clients rapid and easy access to the e-business information, applications, and services they need in order to compete effectively and satisfy customer needs. They offer many

business benefits to organizations in exploiting the power of the Internet. For example, eintelligence systems give the organization the ability to:

Integrate e-business operations into the traditional business environment, giving business users a complete view of all corporate business operations and information.

Help business users make informed decisions based on accurate and consistent ebusiness information that is collected and integrated from e-business applications. This business information helps business users optimize Web-based offerings (products offered, pricing and promotions, service and support, and so on) to match marketplace requirements and analyze business performance with respect to competitors and the organizations business-performance objectives.

Assist e-business applications in profiling and segmenting e-business customers. Based on this information, businesses can personalize their Web pages and the products and services they offer.

Extend the business intelligence environment outside the corporate firewall, helping the organization share internal business information with trading partners. Sharing this information will let it optimize the product supply chain to match the demand for products sold through the Internet and minimize the costs of maintaining inventory.

Extend the business intelligence environment outside the corporate firewall to key corporate clients, giving them access to business information about their accounts. With this information, clients can analyze and tune their business relationships with other organization, improving client service and satisfaction.

Link e-business applications with business intelligence and collaborative processing applications, allowing internal and external users to seamlessly move among different systems.

1.2 INTELLIGENT E-SERVICES

The building blocks of new, sophisticated, intelligent data warehousing applications are now intelligent e-services. An e-service is any asset made available via the Internet to drive new revenue streams or create new efficiencies. What makes e-services valuable is not only the immediacy of the service, but also the intelligence behind the service. While traditional data warehousing meant simple business rules, simple queries and pro-active work to take advantage of the Web, E-Intelligence is much more sophisticated and enables the Web to work on our behalf. Combining intelligence with e-services promises exciting business opportunities. There are some terms defined in e-intelligence, which are as follows:Data Warehouse: it is a collection of data to support the management decisions making. It revolves around the major subjects of the business to support the management. OLAP: it is used to generate complex queries of multidimensional collection of data from the data warehouse. Data Mining: consists of various techniques that explore and bring complex relationships in very large sets.

CHAPTER2

HISTORY

In a 1958 article, IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn used the term E-intelligence. He defined intelligence as: "the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal."E-intelligence as it is understood today is said to have evolved from the decision support systems which began in the 1960s and developed throughout the mid-1980s. DSS originated in the computer-aided models created to assist with decision making and planning. From DSS, data warehouses, Executive Information Systems, OLAP and business intelligence came into focus beginning in the late 80s. In 1989, Howard Dresner (later a Gartner Group analyst) proposed "E-intelligence" as an umbrella term to describe "concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems." It was not until the late 1990s that this usage was widespread. The origins of e-intelligence may be traced back to the first data processing applications, which were simple applications such as accounts payable and receivable. These applications ran on sequential technology, such as magnetic and paper tapes. Using sequential media for storage meant the entire file had to be accessed, even if only a fraction of the file was needed. Oxide often stripped off of magnetic tapes, and entire files were lost. These issues led to the need for a new way to analyze information i.e. eintelligence. As corporations move rapidly toward deploying e-business systems, the lack of business intelligence facilities in these systems prevents decision makers from exploiting the full potential of the Internet as a sales, marketing, and support channel. To solve this problem, vendors are rapidly enhancing their business intelligence offerings to capture the data flowing through e-business systems and integrate it with the information that traditional decision-making systems manage and analyze. These enhanced business intelligence or eintelligence systems may provide significant business benefits to traditional brick-andmortar companies as well as new dot-com ones as they build e-business environments.

Organizations have been successfully using decision processing products, including data warehouse and business intelligence tools, for the past several years to optimize day-today business operations and to leverage enterprise-wide corporate data for a competitive advantage. The advent of the Internet and corporate extranets has propelled many of these organizations toward the use of e-business applications to further improve business efficiency, decrease costs and increase revenues - and to compete with new dot.com companies appearing in the marketplace. The explosive growth in the use of e-business has led to the need for decision-processing systems to be enhanced to capture and integrate business information flowing through ebusiness systems. These systems also need to be able to apply business intelligence techniques to this captured-business information. These enhanced decision processing systems, or E-Intelligence, have the potential to provide significant business benefits to both traditional bricks-and-mortar companies and new dot.com companies as they begin to exploit the power of e-business processing.

CHAPTER 3

ENTERPRISE INFORMATION PORTAL

3.1 INTRODUCTION
It is fortunate that the Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) concept was introduced by two analysts with a concern for definition. Else, given the sudden popularity of EIPs, there would be no restraint on the tendency of vendors to try to exploit the label by attaching it to their products. Even so, since the area is in a state of very rapid growth and differentiation, vendors and analysts with an interest in it are adding their own orientations and nuances to the EIP idea every day. Some do this by addressing the term EIP directly, others by defining related terms such as business portal or corporate portal. Inevitably, the process of definition is a "political" business-an attempt to persuade the Investment/IT and ultimately the user community to define EIP in a manner favoring ones own vendor or analytical interests. If a vendor gets their favored definition accepted, it gets to say that a competing vendor is not really an EIP vendor, or lacks this or that required EIP characteristic. If an analyst or consultant gets its definition accepted, it gets a boost for its mind share and all the rewards that accompany such a competitive advantage over other consultants or analysts. But if the process of EIP definition is political, it is politics constrained by the reality that any successful EIP definition must offer strategic advantage to the community. It must provide an image of the scope of the EIP area that the community will accept as both providing a clear idea of what an EIP is, and also a vision of what it ought to be. In order to both clarify the developing network of meanings surrounding the EIP concept, and also provide my own view about how the term should be defined strategically. "Enterprise Information Portals are applications that enable companies to unlock internally and externally stored information, and provide users a single gateway to personalized information needed to make informed business decisions. They are an amalgamation of software applications that consolidate, manage, analyze and distribute information across and outside of an enterprise (including Business Intelligence, Content Management, Data Warehouse & Mart and Data Management applications.)"

3.2 CHARACTERISTICS
There are the some essential characteristics of enterprise information portal, which are as follows:1. EIPs use both "push" and "pull" technologies to transmit information to users through a standardized web-based interface; 2. EIPs provide "interactivity" the ability to question and share information on" user desktops. 3. EIPs exhibit the trend toward "verticalization" in application software. That is, they are often "packaged applications" providing "targeted content to specific industries or corporate functions;" 4. EIPs integrate disparate applications including Content Management, Business Intelligence, Data Warehouse/Data Mart, Data Management, and other data external to these applications into a single system that can "share, manage and maintain information from one central user interface." 5. An EIP is able to access both external and internal sources of data and information. 6. It is able to support a bi-directional exchange of information with these sources. And it is able to use the data and information it acquires for further processing and analysis.

3.3 ROLE OF EIP

Information flow from back- and front-office operational applications, to business intelligence and collaborative processing systems, and back to operational systems can be thought of as a closed-loop information supply chain. To obtain a complete and accurate picture of a companys business operations, users must be able to access that complete information supply chain. EIPs are emerging as a potential solution to this problem. An EIP gives the organizations internal users a single Webbased interface to business information and to the applications that produce business information, regardless of where they reside. A user can personalize the information and applications viewed through an EIP to match the requirements and authorization level of eachbusiness user, whether an executive, business analyst, or clerical assistant.

An EIP also customizes information and application access to suit the users role. For example, an EIP could give a business analyst in a marketing department a view of the information required to launch a new marketing campaign. This information could include analyses of customer profitability and past campaigns stored in a business intelligence system, marketing collateral managed by a collaborative processing system, and competitive marketing data contributed by an external information provider.

Figure 3.1: An Enterprise Information Portal for E-business

CHAPTER 4

E-INTELLIGENCE PROCESSING
4.1 E-INTELLIGENCE REQUIREMENTS
An e-intelligence system builds on and extends existing business intelligence tools and applications, including enterprise information portals (EIPs). It outlines the architecture of an e-intelligence system and provides examples of the business intelligence capabilities an organization should seek in such a system, including: One-to-one e-marketing analysis applications that customize and personalize information, applications, services, and products offered to consumers and clients via the Internet Content, customer, and merchandise-analysis applications that track and analyze how users navigate the organizations e-business sites and use applications to buy products. Channel and cross-channel analysis and campaign applications that measure and analyze the success of the Internet as a sales, marketing, and services channel. Supply-chain analysis applications that let the organization work with trading partners in optimizing the product supply chain to match the demand for products sold through the Internet. A simple and integrated e-intelligence Web interface to give internal and external Web users and applications secure, managed access to the organizations business information, applications, and services. Demand-driven business intelligence gathering and analysis, and real-time decisions and recommendations as consumers and clients interact with e-business systems via the Internet.

Figure 4.1.E-Intelligence Processing

4.2 FRAMEWORK FOR E-INTELLIGENCE

E-intelligence introduces a business and technology framework for constructing an integrated e-intelligence operating environment. The framework has two key components: a business intelligence system and an EIP. Business intelligence processing involves using extract-transform-load (ETL) tools or inhouse developed applications to extract data from source back-office operational systems (ERP, supply-chain management, and legacy applications, for example), and then transforming and integrating the extracted data into useful business information for corporate decision-making. Usually, enterprises would store this business information in a data warehouse.

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Figure 4.2: E-Intelligence Framework

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Figure 4.3: Features of an enhanced business intelligence system

With a data warehouse, decision-makers can use online analytic processing (OLAP) tools and analytic applications to analyze the information about current business operations and identify ways of reducing costs and increasing profits and revenues. This analysis typically comprises the following steps: Track key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor trends and detect changes in business patterns. This process may include, for example, monitoring sales and profits or the progress of a new sales campaign. Analyze in detail when and why a particular KPI changed. Model potential business improvements to determine their impact on business; for example, run financial business models or use a data mining tool to profile and segment customers for a new sales campaign. Modify business operations to incorporate the decisions and actions made as a result of business-intelligence processing. 12

A business intelligence system gives its users the businessinformation they need to make informed business decisions. These decisions oftenresult in changes to back-office operationsfor example, the introduction of newproducts or changes to product pricing. These decisions (and associated actions) aretypically made by users interacting via collaborative processing documents such asemail and presentations. When e-business is involved, this ad hoc, manual approach toclosing the loop from business intelligence systems back to operational systems istoo slow, and faster, more automated methods are required to support e-businessoperations. An enterprise could also use the output from a businessintelligence system to drive frontoffice operations. One component that plays apivotal role here is a campaign management application, which uses businessinformation to develop and manage new marketing campaigns. These campaigns mayraw on a variety of sales channels, including direct sales, direct mail, outbound callcenters, email, fax, and kiosks; e-business systems offer an additional sales channel. As a new sales campaign progresses, the enterprise can use thebusiness intelligence system to analyze front-office data or a campaign managementapplication to fine-tune the current campaign and provide valuable information for future campaigns. Information from external information providers may also be input into the business intelligence system to supplement existing corporate customer and marketing data in areas such as competitive and marketplace analysis. Front-office systems are a valuable source of data for analyzing and thus improving other aspects of company operations, including product quality and the effectiveness of inbound call centers that provide customer and product support and services. But as with back-office operational systems, the loop from business intelligence systems back to the front office is currently closed manually through collaborative processing.

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CHAPTER 5

OLAP &DATA WAREHOUSING

5.1 OLAP TECHNOLOGY

OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) has been growing in popularity due to the increase in data volumes and the recognition of the business value of analytics. Until the midnineties, performing OLAP analysis was an extremely costly process mainly restricted to larger organizations. OLAP allows business users to slice and dice data at will. Normally data in an organization is distributed in multiple data sources and are incompatible with each other. A retail example: Point-of-sales data and sales made via call-center or the Web are stored in different location and formats. It would a time consuming process for an executive to obtain OLAP reports such as - What are the most popular products purchased by customers between the ages 15 to 30? Part of the OLAP implementation process involves extracting data from the various data repositories and making them compatible. Making data compatible involves ensuring that the meaning of the data in one repository matches all other repositories. An example of incompatible data: Customer ages can be stored as birth date for purchases made over the web and stored as age categories (i.e. between 15 and 30) for in store sales. It is not always necessary to create a data warehouse for OLAP analysis. Data stored by operational systems, such as point-of-sales, are in types of databases called OLTPs. OLTP, Online Transaction Process, databases do not have any difference from a structural perspective from any other databases. The main difference and only, difference is the way in which data is stored. Examples of OLTPs can include ERP, CRM, SCM, Point-of-Sale applications, Call Center. OLTPs are designed for optimal transaction speed. When a consumer makes a purchase online, they expect the transactions to occur instantaneously. With a database design, call data modeling, optimized for transactions the record 'Consumer name, Address, Telephone, Order Number, Order Name, Price, Payment Method' is created quickly on the database and the results can be recalled by managers equally quickly if needed.

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Figure 5.1. Data Model for OLTP Data are not typically stored for an extended period on OLTPs for storage cost and transaction speed reasons.OLAPs have a different mandate from OLTPs. OLAPs are designed to give an overview analysis of what happened. Hence the data storage (i.e. data modeling) has to be set up differently. The most common method is called the star design.

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Figure 5.2: Star Data Model for OLAP

The central table in an OLAP start data model is called the fact table. The surrounding tables are called the dimensions. Using the above data model, it is possible to build reports that answer questions such as:

The supervisor that gave the most discounts. The quantity shipped on a particular date, month, year or quarter. In which zip code did product A sell the most.

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5.1.1 OLAP CUBE

To obtain answers, such as the ones above, from a data model OLAP cubes are created. OLAP cubes are not strictly cuboids - it is the name given to the process of linking data from the different dimensions. The cubes can be developed along business units such as sales or marketing. Or a giant cube can be formed with all the dimensions.

Figure 5.3: OLAP Cube with Time, Customer and Product Dimensions OLAP can be a valuable and rewarding business tool. Aside from producing reports, OLAP analysis can aid an organization evaluate balanced scorecard targets.

Figure 5.4:Steps in the OLAP Creation Process

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Figure 5.5: Elements of business Intelligence The major OLAP vendors are Hyperion, Cognos, Business Objects, Micro Strategy. The cost per seat was in the range of $1500 to $5000 per annum. The setting up of the environment to perform OLAP analysis would also require substantial investments in time and monetary resources. This has changed as the major database vendor have started to incorporate OLAP modules within their database offering - Microsoft SQL Server 2000 with Analysis Services, Oracle with Express and Darwin, and IBM with DB2.

5.2 Data warehousing

Data warehousing is a collection of decision support technologies, aimed at enabling the knowledge worker (executive, manager, analyst) to make better and faster decisions. The past three years have seen explosive growth, both in the number of products and services offered, and in the adoption of these technologies by industry. According to the META Group, the data warehousing market, including hardware, database software, and tools, is projected to grow from $2 billion in 1995 to $8 billion in 1998. Data warehousing technologies have been successfully deployed in many industries: manufacturing (for order shipment and customer support), retail (for user profiling and inventory management), financial services (for claims analysis, risk analysis, credit card analysis, and fraud detection), transportation (for fleet management), 18

telecommunications(for call analysis and fraud detection), utilities (for power usage analysis), and healthcare (for outcomes analysis). This paper presents a roadmap of data warehousing technologies, focusing on the special requirements that data warehouses place on database management systems (DBMSs). A data warehouse is a subject-oriented, integrated, time varying, non-volatile collection of data that is used primarily in organizational decision making. Typically, the data warehouse is maintained separately from the organizations operational databases. There are many reasons for doing this. The data warehouse supports on-line analytical processing (OLAP), the functional and performance requirements of which are quite different from those of the on-line transaction processing (OLTP) applications traditionally supported by the operational databases. OLTP applications typically automate clerical data processing tasks such as order entry and banking transactions that are the bread-and-butter day-to-day operations of an organization. These tasks are structured and repetitive, and consist of short, atomic, isolated transactions. The transactions require detailed, up-to-date data, and read or update a few (tens of) records accessed typically on their primary keys. Operational databases tend to be hundreds of megabytes to gigabytes in size. Consistency and recoverability of the database are critical, and maximizing transaction throughput is the key performance metric. Consequently, the database is designed to reflect the operational semantics of known applications, and, in particular, to minimize concurrency conflicts. Data warehouses, in contrast, are targeted for decision support. Historical, summarized and consolidated data is more important than detailed, individual records. Since data warehouses contain consolidated data, perhaps from several operational databases, over potentially long periods of time, they tend to be orders of magnitude larger than operational databases; enterprise data warehouses are projected to be hundreds of gigabytes to terabytes in size. The workloads are query intensive with mostly ad hoc, complex queries that can access millions of records and perform a lot of scans, joins, and aggregates. Query throughput and response times are more important than transaction throughput. To facilitate complex analyses and visualization, the data in a warehouse is typically modeled multi-dimensionally. For example, in a sales data warehouse, time of sale, sales district, salesperson, and product might be some of the dimensions of interest. Often, these dimensions are hierarchical; time of sale may be organized as a day-month-quarteryear hierarchy, product as a product-category-industry hierarchy. 19

5.2.1 Data Warehouse Design

Designing and rolling out a data warehouse is a complex process, consisting of the following activities: Define the architecture, do capacity planning, and select the storage servers, database and OLAP servers, and tools. Integrate the servers, storage, and client tools. Design the warehouse schema and views. Define the physical warehouse organization, data placement, partitioning, and access methods. Connect the sources using gateways, ODBC drivers, or other wrappers. Design and implement scripts for data extraction, cleaning, transformation, load, and refresh. Populate the repository with the schema and view definitions, scripts, and other metadata. Design and implement end-user applications. Roll out the warehouse and applications.

5.3 Data warehousing v/s OLAP Technology

OLAP operations include rollup (increasing the level of aggregation) and drill-down (decreasing the level of aggregation or increasing detail) along one or more dimension hierarchies, slice and dice (selection and projection), and pivot (re-orienting the multidimensional view of data). Given that operational databases are finely tuned to support known OLTP workloads, trying to execute complex OLAP queries against the operational databases would result in unacceptable performance. Furthermore, decision support requires data that might be missing from the operational databases; for instance, understanding trends or making predictions requires historical data, whereas operational databases store only current data. Decision support usually requires consolidating data from many heterogeneous sources: these might include external sources such as stock market feeds, in addition to several operational databases. The different sources might contain data of varying quality, or use inconsistent representations, codes and formats, which have to be reconciled. Finally, supporting the multidimensional data models and operations typical of OLAP requires special data 20

organization, access methods, and implementation methods, not generally provided by commercial DBMSs targeted for OLTP. It is for all these reasons that data warehouses are implemented separately from operational databases. Data warehouses might be implemented on standard or extended relational DBMSs, called Relational OLAP servers. These servers assume that data is stored in relational databases, and they support extensions to SQL and special access and implementation methods to efficiently implement the multidimensional data model and operations. In contrast, multidimensional OLAP servers are servers that directly store multidimensional data in special data structures (e.g., arrays) and implement the OLAP operations over these special data structures. There is more to building and maintaining a data warehouse than selecting an OLAP server and defining a schema and some complex queries for the warehouse. Different architectural alternatives exist. Many organizations want to implement an integrated enterprise warehouse that collects information about all subjects (e.g., customers, products, sales, assets, personnel) spanning the whole organization. However, building an enterprise warehouse is a long and complex process, requiring extensive business modeling, and may take many years to succeed. Some organizations are settling for data marts instead, which are departmental subsets focused on selected subjects (e.g., a marketing data mart may include customer, product, and sales information). These data marts enable faster roll out, since they do not require enterprise-wide consensus, but they may lead to complex integration problems in the long run, if a complete business model is not developed. It describes a typical data warehousing architecture, and the process of designing and operating a data warehouse. It describes relevant technologies for loading and refreshing data in a data warehouse, warehouse servers, front end tools, and warehouse management tools. In each case, we point out what is different from traditional database technology, and we mention representative products. In this paper, we do not intend to provide comprehensive descriptions of all products in every category. We encourage the interested reader to look at recent issues of trade magazines such as Data based Advisor, Database Programming and Design, Defamations and DBMS Magazine, and vendors Web sites for more details of commercial products, white papers, and case studies. The OLAP Council2 is a good source of information on standardization efforts across the industry, and a paper by Coded, ET al.3 defines twelve rules for OLAP products. Finally, 21

a good source of references on data warehousing and OLAP is the Data Warehousing Information Center4.Research in data warehousing is fairly recent, and has focused primarily on query processing and view maintenance issues. There still are many open research problems.

5.4 Architecture and End-to-End Process

Figure 5.6: Data Warehousing Architecture

It includes tools for extracting data from multiple operational databases and external sources; for cleaning, transforming and integrating this data; for loading data into the data warehouse; and for periodically refreshing the warehouse to reflect updates at the sources and to purge data from the warehouse, perhaps onto slower archival storage. In addition to the main warehouse, there may be several departmental data marts. Data in the warehouse and data marts is stored and managed by one or more warehouse servers, which present multidimensional views of data to a variety of frontend tools: query tools, report writers, analysis tools, and data mining tools. Finally, there is a repository for storing and managing metadata, and tools for monitoring and Administering the warehousing system. The warehouse may be distributed for load balancing, scalability, and higher availability. In such a distributed architecture, the metadata repository is usually replicated with each

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fragment of the warehouse, and the entire warehouse is administered centrally. An alternative architecture, implemented for expediency when it may be too expensive to construct a single logically integrated enterprise warehouse, is a federation of warehouses or data marts, each with its own repository and decentralized administration.

5.5 OLAP V/S OLTP

We can divide IT systems into transactional (OLTP) and analytical (OLAP). In general we can assume that OLTP systems provide source data to data warehouses, whereas OLAP systems help to analyze it. OLTP (On-line Transaction Processing) is characterized by a large number of short online transactions (INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE). The main emphasis for OLTP systems is put on very fast query processing, maintaining data integrity in multi-access environments and an effectiveness measured by number of transactions per second. In OLTP database there is detailed and current data, and schema used to store transact is the entity model

OLAP (On-line Analytical Processing) is characterized by relatively low volume of transactions. Queries are often very complex and involve aggregations. For OLAP systems a response time is an effectiveness measure. OLAP applications are widely used by Data Mining techniques. In OLAP database there is aggregated, historical data, stored in multi-dimensional schemas.

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Figure 5.7: OLTP V/S OLAP

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CHAPTER 6

E-BUSINESS

Figure 6.1: Business Challenges

6.1 IMPACT OF E-BUSINESS

The Web is truly a valuable source of business information. Information stored on Web servers on the public Internet are a potential data source for a data warehouse, or at least can be accessed from an EIP. Furthermore, as corporations begin using Internet commerce sites as sales and marketing channels, the associated business-to-consumer ebusiness systems become an additional source of information for business-intelligence processing. The source data here may be stored in conventional database and file systems, but may also come from Web server logs or even the Web click stream as users interact

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with e-business applications. Thus, business intelligence systems not only need to be able to extract new types of data, but also handle the potentially huge data volumes involved. When data in business-to-consumer systems is extracted to the data warehouse, business users can analyze it using OLAP tools and analytic applications. This analysis is a crucial step in the optimization of e-business operations and the evaluation of the Internet as a sales channel. Using the Internet as a sales channel offers significant benefits; for example, products can be brought to market much faster and at a much lower cost. Selling through the Internet, however, is very competitive, and the organization must be able to react rapidly to consumer requirements and changing marketplace conditions. Four key success factors are involved here: 1. The enterprise must optimize its product supply chain to match consumer demand. 2. Its business users have to make business decisions more rapidly, possibly in real time. 3. Service and support are key differentiators; 4. Because of the high rate of technology change, the e-intelligence system must have an open, scalable infrastructure.

6.2 PRODUCT SUPPLY CHAIN OPTIMIZATION

The challenge in any consumer environment is to satisfy consumer demand without incurring the costs of oversupply (excess inventory). If an organization is typical, it has been using business intelligence systems and their associated data warehouses for years to analyze sales data and optimize product supply and inventory. The enterprise can apply these techniques equally well when selling products through Internet commerce servers. One obvious advantage of the Internet is that it consists of a single virtual storefront, which is easier to manage and Supply than multiple physical stores. The low entry cost of employing the Internet as a sales and marketing channel, however, is creating a more competitive environment and forcing retail prices down. This price pressure in turn forces companies to fine-tune their profit margins and product supply chains. One way to rapidly and efficiently do so is to let business users and external trading partners tap the internal closed-loop information supply chain described here. With this approach, the company can share business information and work cooperatively to reduce costs and optimize profit margins.

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The simplest approach to supplying business information to end users in trading partners is via an EIP. With an EIP, the enterprise can customize, personalize, and control the information flowing among trading organizations across corporate extranets, or even the Internet. An EIP is also useful for controlling information flow between clients in nonretail situations. An insurance company could, for example, let key clients view and analyze claims history information via an EIP, and then, if appropriate, use the EIP to switch from the business intelligence environment to the e-business environment to modify insurance coverage.

6.3 Real-time Decision-Making

Closing the loop between business intelligence and operational systems has traditionally been done manually using collaborative processing documents. However, in the ebusiness environment, a manual approach to decision-making can be inadequate, in which case a more dynamic and automated process is required. One example here is that the enterprise may want to dynamically control the Web pages displayed to potential ebusiness customers. The decisions in this situation could be based on parameters such as the buying power of each customer and the types of products in which they may be interested. Another example is wherethe customer expects an immediate decision when using the e-business application. This situation could occur, for example, when a customer applies for a new credit card or requests a credit upgrade. The competitive nature of the Internet requires companies to react immediately to such requests or risk losing the customer to a competitor. This need to make rapid decisions leads to the notion that our business intelligence systems must operate in real time. This real-time requirement, however, has several flavors. Returning to the credit card example, assuming that a customer requests an upgrade to a platinum credit card, he or she has been with the financial institution for one year, and that the decision to upgrade the customer is based on a three-year return on investment (ROI). To make this decision, the e-business application will need to determine the existing one-year ROI of the customer, and predict based on the customers profilethe likely remaining two year ROI. To do so, the e-business application will need to do two things:

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Access data warehouse summarized data in real time to retrieve the one-year ROI for the customer, calculate in real time the one-year ROI from detailed warehouse data, or extract in real time the required data from operational systems. Profile the customer and run a business model that predicts a two-year ROI in real time for a customer with that profile. In some cases, the business models itself and its associated business rules may have to be built or modified in real time. This example demonstrates several aspects of real-time processingincluding the need to make decisions, access and analyze data warehouse information, extract data from operational and e-business systems, and build business models and rules in real time. Real-time processing can also involve getting data from external systemsto obtain marketing or customer data from an external information provider, for example thus there is a manual and a real-time approach to corporate decision-making. To summarize, the former involves business users employing business intelligence systems to manually analyze business information, and then manually feeding business decisions back to the operational and e-business environments using a collaborative processing system or EIP. The latter involves an event-driven e-business or analytic application that analyzes business information and makes automated business decisions in real time. There are, however, other options between these two extremes.

A possible middle-of-the-road approach could be supported by an analytic application that detects a certain business event (a sudden change in stock values, for example) and then employs a business model and associated business rules to automatically analyze business information, and alert and make recommendations to business users about potential business actions.

6.4 E-BUSINESS INFRASTRUCTURE

Given the large number of users and amount of data involved in e-business processing, this infrastructure must provide good performance, reliability, and scalability if the organization is to survive in this highly competitive approach to sales, marketing, and support. Also, given the high rate of change in this area, the framework must support industry standards where they exist and be open so that organizations can plug in different vendor products as their requirements change.

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An e-intelligence system not only enables business intelligence techniques to be applied to the e-business environment, but also adds capabilities not currently available in the traditional business intelligence environment: namely, real-time analysis and decision making.

6.5 OUTPOST
Outpost.com is known for its radical commercials. The E-intelligence efforts of the online retailer of PCs, consumer electronics, and other goods are as leading-edge as its advertising. Outpost.com gathers click stream data from its Web environment and transaction data from its order-processing, inventory, and shipping systems, then feeds it all into an Oracle8 database. The Web server generates some 3 million to 5 million click stream records each day, while the transaction/inventory system creates another 1 million records. Software from S agent Technology Inc. then pulls data from the Oracle system and loads it into one of nearly two dozen data marts running on Microsoft SQL Server 7.0. Managers and business analysts at Outpost.com (owned by Cyberian Outpost Inc. of Kent, Conn.) use the subject-specific data marts including demand/orders, customers, shipping, returns, and inventory/purchasing--to analyze aspects of Outpost.com's business. Inventory managers, for example, can determine how certain products are selling or how well Outpost.com's suppliers are meeting shipping schedules. Outpost.com's marketing staff uses the data to segment customers based on the kinds of products they buy, or combines it with demographic data from Profile America List Company Inc. to build customer profiles. Identifies by name people who have purchased products or have registered with its Web site. Electronic cookies identify repeat visitors to its Web site. Analysis tools from SAS Institute Inc. segment customers according to criteria such as profitability, based on how frequently they return to the site and what kinds of products they buy. A major use for the collected intelligence is developing targeted E-mail marketing campaigns. Such campaigns generate a 10% response rate, compared with the industry average of 2% to 3%. The company also uses the data to perform return-on-investment analysis "on everything," including individual products, E-mail campaigns, and TV and radio ads. Outpost.com has other applications in its E-intelligence toolkit. The company uses Data Sage Inc.'s Net Customer to identify customer buying patterns and trends, for example, 29

and Rubric Inc.'s Enterprise Marketing Automation software to manage its E-mail campaigns. Outpost.com is adding personalization capabilities to its Web site using Broad Vision Inc.'s One-to-One customer-relationship marketing software. Initially, special offers, discounts, and promotions will be based on analyzing which pages a Web-site visitor looked at during previous visits without making a purchase. In the future, it will be able to provide those capabilities in real time--making offers to customers as they surf the site.

6.6 INTERNET, INTRANET AND EXTRANET

Internet
Internet is a network of networks of computer hosts able to seamlessly communicate, usually through the Internet protocol (IP) and Services.

Intranet
An intranet is an exclusive version of internet on an organization which enables people inside the organization to share information easily.

Extranet
An extranet is a private network that uses the Internet Protocol and the public telecommunication system to securely share part of a business information or operations with suppliers, vendors, partners, customers or other businesses. 6.6.1 Network Advantage 1. Resource Sharing: - Programs, data and peripherals are available to all parties without physical dependencies. 2. High Reliability: - Data replication and availability on more than one Computer. 3. Saving Money: - Price-performance ratio of small scale (personal) Computers is higher than large scale computers. 4. Communication Medium: - Make communication process easier

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Figure 6.2: Network Links

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6.7 The Benefits of e-Business

Generate additional Revenues New markets New products New customers Reduce Costs (Integration and Collaboration) Process efficiency Reduce IT variety and -complexity Synergies with other initiatives Customer Retention (Added Services and Virtual Community) Know more about your customers Integrated channel management Proactive and personalized offerings Improve Image / Position Brand Applying innovative technologies Leadership enterprise Address younger customer segments Not to miss the boat Keeping options open Acquire know-how Focused investments

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Figure 6.3: E-Business Elements

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Figure 6.4:The Degree of Business Activity On-Line By Activity

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Figure 6.5: On-Line/Brick & Mortar Products and Services

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Figure 6.6: Extent of Internet Application Benefits

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Figure 6.7: Number One E-Intelligence Benefit Cited By Industry

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CHAPTER 7

ADVANTAGE & DISADVANTAGE

7.1 ADVANTAGES
Lower customer support costs, replacing existing manual, paper-based systems. Increased customer satisfaction, through timely, self-service access to information. Increased differentiation compared to competitors product offers, leading directly to increases in top-line revenue. Improve Communications. Faster, fewer mistakes. On time, within budget

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7.2 DISADVANTAGES
Security Dependence of computer Time lost to learning new tools and methods Documents lost in transition

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7.3 FUTURE ASPECTS

Expanded market coverage through Web storefronts-commerce Knowledge sharing and productivity gains through intranets Streamlined supply chains through extranets Improve customer service

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CONCLUSION
Presently the internet and e-Business are growing at an astonishing rate. As the size of the internet increases its reach and thus its business potential also increases. There will be tremendous competition an all dotcom companies to stay ahead. In such a fiercely competitive marketplace e-Intelligence solutions will become a necessity to stay ahead. Future e-Intelligence techniques will be aimed at optimizing whole web content depending on users.

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REFERENCES

http://www.xpient.com/eintelligence.htm http://www.projecttopics.info/seminars.php http://www.seminarsonly.com/forum www.tarrani.net/kate/docs/strategicapplicationofeintel.pdf www.scribd.com/doc/7148884/e-intelligence uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/bitstrwww.seminarprojects.com www.seminarprojects.com/attachment.php?aid=86 Google images

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