Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Academic Writing

Business Intelligence is the systems that help the user to make a right decision for a business. According to Webopedia.com (2012), the term Business Intelligence (BI) represents the tools and systems that play a key role in the strategic planning process of the corporation. “These systems allow a company to gather, store, access and analyze corporate data to aid in decision-making. BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations “(Wikipedia, 2012). As stated by Luca Rossetti (2006), Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. BI applications include the activities of decision support systems, query and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining. Business Intelligence also can help users if it designed very well. According to Information Builders (2012), Well-designed BI applications can give anyone in your company the ability to make better decisions by quickly understanding the various “information assets” in your organization and how these interact with each other. These assets can include customer databases, supply chain information, personnel data, manufacturing, and sales and marketing activity, as well as any other source of information critical to your operation. BI software allows you to integrate these disparate data sources into a single coherent framework for real-time reporting and detailed analysis by anyone in your extended enterprise – customers, partners, employees, managers, and executives. As we might know, maybe many big organizations is using a Business Intelligence and many offshore outsourcing company is selling their business intelligence software development services with good quality to their customers.

As we known in doing some business intelligence there are must have challenges to complete a project sharply. According to Shaku Atre (2003), more than half of all Business Intelligence projects are either never completed or fail to deliver the features and benefits that are optimistically agreed on at their outset. While there are many reasons for this high failure rate, the biggest is that companies treat BI projects as just another IT project. We can group the Business Intelligence challenges into three area which is process, technological and people. These three areas are the real challenge in Business Intelligence to develop a project. As stated by Enoack (2012), Process - many companies have formed over time as islands of information with many "versions of the truth". Business intelligence or "BI" seeks to find authoritative sources of data that define limited, concrete dimensional definitions of the business and use those to perform reporting. Getting multiple departments "on the same page" when defining what needs to be reported can be a daunting task. Technological - the typical tools for developing analytical reporting can be fairly expensive and require a fairly good depth of knowledge to use effectively. Individuals needed are data architects/data modelers/OLAP developers/report writers. People - parts of this are in the top areas, however, it is worth mentioning that getting the right people involved in a project, particularly in strong leadership from the top, is key to success. Luckily, many BI projects are sponsored from the executive office. Another "spin" on this point is the importance of setting the right expectations and communicating well to avoid disappointment by the customer.

Business Intelligence also has a good opportunity to the users. The opportunities can help the user to make a correct decision towards business. “Business Intelligence and Censorship is the one example of opportunities, an article in The Wall Street Journal (March 28, 2011) that was entitled “U.S. Products Help Block Mideast Web.” The article discusses how telecommunication companies can use Netsweeper’s Internet content filtering and web threat management solutions. Netsweeper is marketed to educational institutions, government organizations, businesses, service providers and OEM partners around the world to block web content that the client deems to be inappropriate. Relative to the Mideast, the story mentions that the product is used to block content by using a pre-established list of more than 90 categories to meet government rules and regulations based on social, religious, or political ideals. Second opportunities are there are basically three means by which business intelligence can be organized: centralized, decentralized, or automated. A centralized approach tends to focus on BI competency centers, while the decentralized approach focuses on client mentoring and support. Automated business intelligence is a whole other animal: the process of developing, deploying, and maintaining BI solutions is streamlined with automation and BI solutions are delivered on demand. Each approach provides its own rationale and proposes its own benefits while typically condemning the other approaches. Which is the better or preferred approach is open to opinion and experience. Last opportunities is Sentiment Analysis Business intelligence is being used to discover what you do, how you do it, where you do it, and now how you feel about what you do! Sentiment analysis is about mining the web for feelings, not facts. Social media is an incredibly rich vein for market intelligence (opinion data) obtained by monitoring blogs, online forums, and social networking sites for trends in opinions. Essentially, sentiment analysis attempts to translate the whims of human emotion into hard data.” (Naxal, 2011)

The business intelligence is only not software but it is an intelligence system that can help users in the business manners. It is also provide users with all information about business for example like marketing sales and personal data. According to Application Development Guide, (2011) Business Intelligence system used for specific business values including:

  • Measurement of performance matrices
  • Business analytic like statistical analysis, data mining, predictive analysis
  • Reporting/Enterprise Reporting
  • Collaboration/Collaboration platform
  • Knowledge Management
  • BI Application enhance collaboration between relevant people and business
  • BI Systems provides detailed graphical view of your business performance.

We can conclude that business intelligence play important role to our business improvement and growth. By using Business Intelligence users can cover all the details about their business. Also in business we need a good business intelligence to make your business is top on their own industry.


References

1. Luca Rossetti (2006). Definition Business Intelligence

retrieve Feb 6, 2012 from http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/definition/business-intelligence

2. wikipedia (2012). Business Intelligence

retrieve Feb 6, 2012 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_intelligence

3. webopedia (2012). Business Intelligence

retrieve Feb 6, 2012 from http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/B/Business_Intelligence.html

4. Information Builders (2012). Business Intelligence

retrieve Feb 6, 2012 from http://www.informationbuilders.com/business-intelligence

5. shaku Atre (2003). The top 10 Crictical challenges for Business Intelligence Success

retrieve Feb 6, 2012 from https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:KOO39JK6dwQJ:www.computerworld.com/computerworld/records/images/pdf/BusIntellWPonline.pdf+business+intelligence+challenges&hl=en&gl=my&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESi0JX9sDDLEAsPhS3DNSc5M7ivkDW9Q5wy6bVXRqu3hsMradmWso5yUhWuN2R1ve-erqNWwLF1og0j3FNp2QGkk7ok9m346h5msYsrXF7QwTh1kuHx3f7irHnjwphkVl8mOV8Ka&sig=AHIEtbQa4Q2YlafnqPqYg5WAdLeOYulTVQ

6. enoack (2012). What are the challenges in rolling out a business intelligence tool?

retrieve Feb 6, 2012 from http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_are_the_challenges_in_rolling_out_a_business_intelligence_tool

7. Naxal (2011). 10 Opportunities for Business Intelligence Research

retrieve Feb 6, 2012 from http://intellibriefs.blogspot.com/2011/09/10-opportunities-for-business.html

8. Development guide (2011). Importance of Business Intelligence Software for Your Business

retrieve Feb 6, 2012 from http://programming-development-guide.blogspot.com/2010/11/importance-of-business-intelligence.html