BI - what is Business Intelligence - Part 1

1:37 PM Viduruwan Suvinith 0 Comments


BI or Business Intelligence can be identify as one of the hottest (I meant latest  :-) ) trends in today.  These days everyone is talking about BI.  So what is this business intelligence mean?




According to Wikipedia BI mean

Computer-based techniques used in identifying, extracting and analyzing business data (Wikipedia , 2011)

So what does Wikipedia mean by this?

Let’s go through another explanation

Business intelligence (BI) simplifies information discovery and analysis, making it possible for decision-makers at all levels of an organization to more easily access, understand, analyze, collaborate, and act on information, anytime and anywhere. (Microsoft , 2008)

I think now we can conclude what is BI is

Simply BI is discipline of Identification and collecting data from different sources, analyzing them and get information (meaning full processed data) that help to take decisions.

So what is the big deal of this?

Imagine you are handling a company, your customer base can count in thousands or in millions, the more your company grow, data will flooding to you. So in tradition system, what will happen is you keep all the data recorded and when ever need them go through manually, then analysis them manually and make the decisions, or else you need to hire someone to do It on behalf of you.

So how BI is different from this process?

BI concept take data, may be real time or stored data and analysis them, organize them to a way that helps you to make the decision. The entire process except taking the decision is an automated thing in computer oriented BI.

So then what is the problem?

In order to analysis those data either you have to be trained from the childhood or exceptional in mathematics. Even if you are someone like that keep that kind of data amount (I’m talking millions of records) is not possible as a human, so this is the place computer use as a tool.

So how computer use to BI ?

There are different software developed in order to do such kind of things ,

Example please

Sql Server Analysis Service, Oracle BI , Share Point Business connectivity service , MS Excel  (Is it ?) ……………

Few years back, if you need to have BI solution, you have to ask help from professional or you have to purchase a software after paying thousands of dollars.

But today, Microsoft has made your life easier

You can use simple excel workbook to archive same functionality, yeh you are correct ! you can use power pivot or traditional pivot tables in excel to do it.

I will explain how to do it in another post, till then “Have a nice time”

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