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The Advent of
Business Intelligence

All Rights Reserved: Decodr Technologies Pvt. Ltd

 Agenda
• What is BI
• Examples
• History
• Versions
• Features
• Advantages & Limitations
• Technical Approaches
• Applications
• Functions

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 What is BI
The term Business Intelligence refers collectively to the tools and techniques used for the
• collection,
• integration,
• analysis and
• visualization of raw data.
To simplify the concept, raw data is collected from various sources and with the help of Business Intelligence
tools and is transformed into meaningful information, stored in data warehouses in predefined manners.
From the data warehouses, we can retrieve stored data in the form of a report, query or conduct an analysis. This can
also be explained using ETL (Extract, Transform, Load concept).

It helps in analyzing business trends from past and help in taking lucrative business steps in future.

BI is a dynamic approach, that means it’s output changes and evolves with time and trends in business.

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 A Retail Store Example
‘Westside Store’ sells products of various brands both in-store and online.

All the customers are offered a loyalty card which has a unique ID. These cards are used while shopping from Westside
stores or Westside’s online portal. All your purchase details associated with your unique account ID are stored into the
Westside’s database.

Now, the manager of Westside will use BI methods and software to run analytical reports on huge amounts of customer
information to identify consumer trends like their favorite brand, do they prefer in-store shopping or online shopping?
What price range is the most affordable? and during which months or seasons of the year, they shop the most.

Thus, giving the organization valuable information like customer preferences, needs, and habits. Using which the
organization could anticipate new opportunities, deliver better service and come up with new marketing campaigns like
releasing offer coupons, launching a sale etc., serving the ultimate goal of growth of the business.

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 A Brief History of BI
The concept or the term ‘business intelligence’ was first mentioned in the mid-1800s in a work published by Richard Miller
Devens. He observed this in the way of working of a banker named Henry Furnese who simply used to gather important business
information to come up with effective business strategies.

This concept however lingered on and got adopted by the world of computer technology. With the increase in amounts of data
and thus in the storage capacity of devices, emerged the need for good database management tools and techniques.

By the 1960s came a DBMS called Decisions Support Systems (DSS) which was a collection of software. However, the software
coming at this time did conduct all BI functionalities but just a few like data accumulation and organization. One major problem
faced was difficulty and complexity in the usage of this service.

Later, in 1988, after a Multiple Data Analysis consortium in Rome, the picture of BI changed. There came tools with simpler
functioning.

In 1989 and early 1990s there were various such software in use like Executive Information System (EIS), Online Analytical
Processes (OLAP) and the term Business Intelligence (term used by Howard Dresner of Gartner Group) started getting used as a
general term encompassing all such methods and applications.

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 BI Versions
With modifications happening in the technologies of business intelligence, there are two versions or phases of it.
Business Intelligence 1.0
With the evolving technologies under Business Intelligence during the late 1990s and 2000s, the BI software also
became abundant. The main functions provided were data collection, analysis, and visualization. However, some
problems were faced like limited employees having the technical expertise to operate the software. The software could
not use by a non-technical person because the data collected was complex and performing operations on it were time-
consuming. This problem was later acknowledged and certain changes in software came, hoping it to make it more
user-friendly.

Business Intelligence 2.0

This version brought with it new Business Intelligence techniques. Addressing the issue, the software was made so that
any non-technical employee could work with Business Intelligence tools without relying on IT professionals. Along with
much-required changes, many new features were added. There came cloud supported programs, real-time data access
and processing. Which gave companies insight into the most recent data and helped them maintain a spot in the highly
competitive market.

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 Features of BI
Here, we will explore the benefits of BI, let’s discuss them one by one:

• Self-service Reporting
• Dashboard
• Interactive Reporting
• Data Visualization
• Data Warehouses

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 Features of BI – One by one

Self Service Reporting

As we already know the problem faced in earlier versions of BI was that it needed professionals or technical IT experts
to prepare data reports. Now, with the introduction of ‘Self- service reporting’, a non-technical employee can also easily
generate reports using the latest BI tools. Users only have to interact with the Meta-data layer while analyzing or
creating reports.

Dashboards
The BI software provides the user with a personal executive dashboard (CEO Dashboard). On this dashboard, a user can
view all the statistical analysis of the company. Through this dashboard, an executive can monitor KPIs, future events
and get regular data summary. This helps in the smooth and efficient functioning of the enterprise.

Interactive Reporting
The reporting offered by Business Intelligence tools is interactive, which means that it presented in such a way that
users can easily draw inferences from it. It also allows flexibility in many ways, like you can get data reports based on
the geographical terrains, analyze data in dynamic or changing conditions, set alerts and data limits which tells you any
data exceptions.

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 Features of BI – One by one

Data Visualization
This feature holds a very important place in the BI concept because it allows enterprises to customize their own apps
and displays data analytics reports in a very easy to understand manner.

Data Warehouses
As discussed earlier , we know that all the collected and integrated raw data is stored in data warehouse. It stores all
the dispersed data coming from different sources in one central location. The data here is standardized using ETL
process so that upon a query request it could systematically search through data.

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 Functions of BI
The functions or services provided by Business Intelligences comes mainly under three categories:

Business Views
All the raw data after collection is transformed into meaningful information and then analyzed using BI technical
approaches. The data results are viewed in from three-time frames, the past views, current views and future or
predictive views.

Business Performance Management

This function operates around the concept of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which as the name suggests reveals
the health and stability of the enterprise. KPIs are basically ratios of different business entities like death to equity etc.
The monitoring and analysis of KPIs are done with the help of BI software.

Business Reports and Queries

After receiving the analyzed data, reports are generated and shared using specific BI tools. The software also supports
batch reporting. A user can view ready-made reports and send queries to retrieve collected and organized data stored
in data warehouses.

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 Technical Approaches
In order to provide all three functionalities, the framework of Business Intelligence requires the help of certain technical
approaches. Without these, the functionalities can’t be provided. Let us understand them one by one:-

Benchmarking
This is a process of comparing and analyzing one’s own data or business trends and stability from that some of the tops
in the industry.

Data Mining
Data Mining is an analysis of massive sets of data from the past in order to find patterns and correlations. It serves as
the backbone of the entire framework of BI. Text analysis or mining also performs in a similar way. In this case, what the
analyst looks for is the tone or public sentiment on social media platforms.

Business Analytics
Business data analysis is the most important technical approach. It can be classified into three types,
namely, Descriptive, Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics.

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 Applications of BI
Any business domain or sector which collects data, utilizes an application of BI. Several examples are-

• IT sector
• Marketing and finance
• Retail and e-commerce
• Tourism and Hospitality
• Manufacturing
• Education

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 Advantages of BI
Advantages

• Efficient use of data.

• Fast analysis of data.
• Deeper insights into the business.
• User- friendly.
• Accurate analysis, reporting and fact-based decision making.
• Increased business profitability.
• Reliable future predictions in business trends.
• Increased flexibility in business.

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 Limitations of BI
Limitations

• Business Intelligence tools can only be used to integrate and analyze structured data, which in reality is only 10-
20% of the entire data. The rest of the data is unstructured like the data from social media platforms etc does not
come under the accessibility of BI technology.

• The sole emphasis for future prediction and decision making is laid on data. This is not always accurate because it
ignores many other factors and just focuses on what data is suggesting. This often creates a problem when the
enterprise needs to take complex decisions.

• Cost and complexity of Business Intelligence often come across as a limitation.

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 Top BI Tools
These are popular BI Tools:

• MS Excel
• Tableau
• Power BI
• SAP Business Intelligence
• SAP HANA
• MicroStrategy
• Sisense
• SAS Business Intelligence
• Dundas BI
• TIBCO Spotfire
• Qlik Sense

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