What is "business intelligence" software?

Question

Is "business intelligence" a buzzword that has no real meaning to software developers, or does the term carry some implied meaning in terms of what the software does or how the software does it (in a general sense)? It appears to be a real business term, but does it mean anything in particular to software that performs business intelligence tasks?

Answer 1

BI != Reporting. BI platforms enable users to build applications that help organizations learn and understand their business. Gartner defines a BI platform as a software platform that delivers the following 12 capabilities:

Integration

• BI infrastructure — All tools in the platform should use the same security, metadata, administration, portal integration, object model and query engine, and should share the same look and feel.
• Metadata management — This is arguably the most important of the 12 capabilities. Not only should all tools leverage the same metadata, but the offering should provide a robust way to search, capture, store, reuse and publish metadata objects such as dimensions, hierarchies, measures, performance metrics and report layout objects.
• Development — The BI platform should provide a set of programmatic development tools — coupled with a software developer's kit for creating BI applications — that can be integrated into a business process, and/or embedded in another application. The BI platform should also enable developers to build BI applications without coding by using wizard-like components for a graphical assembly process. The development environment should also support Web services in performing common tasks such as scheduling, delivering, administering and managing.
• Workflow and collaboration — This capability enables BI users to share and discuss information via public folders and discussion threads. In addition, the BI application can assign and track events or tasks allotted to specific users, based on pre-defined business rules. Often, this capability is delivered by integrating with a separate portal or workflow tool.

Information Delivery

• Reporting — Reporting provides the ability to create formatted and interactive reports with highly scalable distribution and scheduling capabilities. In addition, BI platform vendors should handle a wide array of reporting styles (for example, financial, operational and performance dashboards).
• Dashboards — This subset of reporting includes the ability to publish formal, Web-based reports with intuitive displays of information, including dials, gauges and traffic lights. These displays indicate the state of the performance metric, compared with a goal or target value. Increasingly, dashboards are used to disseminate real-time data from operational applications.
• Ad hoc query — This capability, also known as self-service reporting, enables users to ask their own questions of the data, without relying on IT to create a report. In particular, the tools must have a robust semantic layer to allow users to navigate available data sources. In addition, these tools should offer query governance and auditing capabilities to ensure that queries perform well.
• Microsoft Office integration — In some cases, BI platforms are used as a middle tier to manage, secure and execute BI tasks, but Microsoft Office (particularly Excel) acts as the BI client. In these cases, it is vital that the BI vendor provides integration with Microsoft Office, including support for document formats, formulas, data "refresh" and pivot tables. Advanced integration includes cell locking and write-back.

Analysis

• OLAP — This enables end users to analyze data with extremely fast query and calculation performance, enabling a style of analysis known as "slicing and dicing." This capability could span a variety of storage architectures such as relational, multidimensional and in-memory.
• Advanced visualization — This provides the ability to display numerous aspects of the data more efficiently by using interactive pictures and charts, instead of rows and columns. Over time, advanced visualization will go beyond just slicing and dicing data to include more process-driven BI projects, allowing all stakeholders to better understand the workflow through a visual representation.
• Predictive modeling and data mining — This capability enables organizations to classify categorical variables and estimate continuous variables using advanced mathematical techniques.
• Scorecards — These take the metrics displayed in a dashboard a step further by applying them to a strategy map that aligns key performance indicators to a strategic objective. Scorecard metrics should be linked to related reports and information in order to do further analysis. A scorecard implies the use of a performance management methodology such as Six Sigma or a balanced scorecard framework.

Answer 2

Business Intelligence is about understanding one's business. It's an odd converse of Military Intelligence which is about understanding the enemy. It provide suits with information with which to make business decisions.

To a developer, it's a type of software one might develop. Not so much one that a developer would use.

Answer 3

You can write a piece of "business intelligence" software - but it's fairly complex. Such software would act like a manager of sorts, by analyzing data and making recommendations. Think about an program with an MBA. The catch is, to actually write a program like that requires not only building analysis tools to let the application automatically scan through information looking for business patterns, but also to give the program "intuition" which most successful business managers have. A program that runs based on strict rules will not necessarily make the best decisions, just the best documented decisions.

I was contacted by a company (this is an example of practical applications for business intelligence) that wanted an application to monitor trends in certain market categories, and use those trends to predict optimal prices for their products. They were selling luxury products whose prices fluctuated throughout the year and according to various economic indicators. Most of their managers could do this kind of price setting, and they were looking to automate it. The analysis required to do this would involve advanced statistics, some artificial intelligence to interpret it, not to mention the ability to acquire the data it needed on its own. The project's opening budget was $2M. Not something for the light-hearted.

Answer 4

I can only speak for Cognos, which is a reporting tool that has been added onto so much that they're calling it a "BI Suite." I think most of the BI tools are the same.

If you see a product labelled as a "BI tool" expect it to be heavily concentrated on reporting (which is the most visible part of BI). You have to create the Data Warehouse yourself, then you'll use the BI tool to model your cube(s) to best represent the data that the users want out of your DW. Finally, you'll create reports using that tool, though your users can see the data that's in the cube using functionality outside reports that you've created.

Also, you can add Business Objects, Crystal reports, any of those reporting tools because really, BI == Reporting.

Answer 5

In practical terms its the buzzword which describes a set of products such as Business Objects, SAS BI, and some offerings from the usual suspects such as Oracle and HP.

Mostly these are "pretty print" report writing front ends to datawarehouse style databases, and, probably the best generic description would be the presentation layer in a data warehouse architecture.

Answer 6

Business Intelligence is about denormalizing your existing OLTP databases into a system of measurement criteria. One of the most important requistes of Business Intelligence systems is that the data that is reported on is outputted with a great deal of speed. The transactional OLTP database systems would choke on queries that an OLAP (database type used for BI reporting) database routinely performs with a great deal of speed. When I speak of speed, in my experience any query that takes greater than 5 seconds indicates a need to refactor the architecture in better ways. In the transactional environment, the database language used is TSQL. In the OLAP world the unified language is known as MDX, Multi-Dimensional eXtensions and actually is an extension to the SQL language. In the Microsoft stack and as of VS 2005, Analysis Services as well as MS SQL Server are at home with the CLR. Applications can be created and maintained directly from within Visual Studio's IDE. The ability to hook into SSIS objects from within VS and create ETL processing layers that can integrate with SQL Server and have the scrubbed Data Warehouse whose source becomes the DataSource for your Analysis Services database certainly indicates to me that a developer gains a ton of control over inputs and outputs when creating solutions with the MS Stack. In any event that is my take.

Based upon experience Business Objects, Oracle and to a lesser degree Cognos were forced into acquisition to enhance their BI offerings with Business Objects being more of a Reporting consumer than a database and reporting consumer company. Cognos in my opinion made the more intelligent acquisition when the acquired an additional planning OLAP database from Applix named TM1 and along with it got one of the best Self service OLAP reporting tools in the business named Executive Viewer which can report against Oracle's Essbase, TM1, Cognos likely by now, Analysis Services, SAP BW, To my knowledge HP has no BI offering. They were using Executive Viewer however when I last looked.

Answer 7

A new generation BI has become much more interactive oriented. With flash and other web 2.0, sophisticated yet easy-to-use dashboards, visualization are delivered on web like reports before.

Answer 8

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. Generally these systems will illustrate business intelligence in the areas of customer profiling, customer support, market research , market segmentation, product profitability, statistical analysis, and inventory and distribution analysis to name a few.

Answer 9

Definition

Business intelligence (BI) refers to skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help a business acquire a better understanding of its commercial context. Business intelligence may also refer to the collected information itself.

BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, OLAP, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarks, text mining, and predictive analytics.

Business intelligence often aims to support better business decision-making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system (DSS).

Personal experience

After having worked for 7 years in a BI software product in the past, I don't think it's an empty buzzword. Go to a supermarket business and ask them how they know how much cheese they put in their store; where they put it; and which brands. Go to a sausage producer: they had our product analyze sells based on lots of variables, for example, which kind of display they got in the supermarket: ordinary, more relevant, hard to spot. They decided which variables were relevant to them and thus should be analyzed. Go to a package sending company and ask them which services they promote and why. They all analyze all their data and they use software for that. Of course you need a brain as well as software; but, alas, you need software as well as a brain.

It may be a wide, open term, yes. But it's not an empty term.

In more practical terms, anything which pays your bills for 7 years is not empty :-)

Answer 10

According to The DataWarehouse Institute (TDWI), BI is "the process, technologies, and tools needed to turn data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into plans that drive profitable business actions".

IMHO, BI does have a meaning, and it isn't just a buzzword, it's particulary true for business people that gain a real value from their data assets thanks to BI.

BI isn't just the fron-end tools of reporting and data analysis, it is rather the sum of technologies, process & peoplen thus, it's more than a technical issue, even if it encompasses a real (and generally hard) technical aspect. link text

Answer 11

Giving a much longer answer seems to make it sound full of wind, so:

Business Intelligence: reporting software with strong additional abilities focused on future prediction based on historical data.

Answer 12

I think the best definition of B.I. is it gives you the ability to easily ask what-if questions of your system. Providing fixed information is reporting. Providing live information is dashboards. Providing interactive answers is B.I.