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Business Intelligence Midterm Topics
Business Intelligence Midterm Topics
Intelligence
Chapter 1 & 2
Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven process for
analyzing data and presenting useful information to help
executives, managers and other end users make informed business
decisions.
The potential benefits of using BI tools include accelerating and
improving decision-making, optimizing internal business
processes, increasing operational efficiency, driving new revenues
and gaining competitive advantage over business rivals.
BI systems can also help companies identify market trends and
spot business problems that need to be addressed. In short, BI
technologies allow a business to view their operations, past,
present and future.
BI technologies handle large amounts of data to help identify,
develop and otherwise create new strategic business
opportunities. Identifying new opportunities and implementing an
effective strategy based on insights can provide businesses with
competitive market advantage and long-term profitability.
BI is most effective when it combines data derived from the
market in which a company operates (external data) with data
from company sources internal to the business such as financial
and operations data (internal data).
• Age: 34
• Big Box Account #: 123456
• Gender: Female
• Zip Code: 22322
• Children: 2
• Marital Status: Married
• Last Purchase: Jogging Pants
Later in the year, Customer #123456 makes an online purchase of a pair
of men’s work boots and a men’s heavyweight coat. The data that
comes into Big Box may look like this:
• Customer #123456
• Date: 10/5/2018
• Item #56-9876 Cougar Work Boots, Size 11
• Item #43-2341 Men’s Heavyweight Denim Coat, Size XL
Business Data
The type of data a business collects is informed by a business’s goals
and objectives.
Computing systems can collect a dizzying array of data about the world
around us. Businesses must decide what type of data they need to
inform their business decisions and where and how that data can be
collected.
The types of data that businesses collect can be broken down into five
broad categories:
• business process
• physical world observations,
• biological data,
• public data and personal data.
Business Process Data
In order to remain competitive businesses must find ways to increase
efficiency while maintaining quality standards for their products, goods and
services. In order to continuously improve their operations, businesses
collect data regarding their business processes. This data can range from
collecting data on the number of days it takes their customers to pay invoices
to the time it takes to assemble and package a product. In order to collect
this type of data, many businesses employ enterprise resource planning
systems. ERP systems track business resources—cash, raw
materials, production capacity—and the status of business commitments:
orders, purchase orders, and payroll. The applications that make up the
system share data across various departments (manufacturing, purchasing,
sales, accounting, etc.) that provide the data.
• Another source of process data is Point of Sale (POS) systems.
• When a cashier scans the barcode on an item that scan collects data
that may be used in inventory management, loyalty programs,
supplier records, bookkeeping, issuing of purchase orders, quotations
and stock transfers, sales reporting and in some cases networking to
distribution centers. The more data a business has about its processes
the more likely it will find opportunities to improve or enhance those
processes.
Physical-world observations.
• Data Mining is not the process of getting specific pieces of data out
of the data warehouse, but rather the goal of data mining is the
identification of patterns and knowledge from large amounts of data.
Data mining tools such as Scrapy, Nutch and Splash allow businesses to
learn more about customers, competitors, compare prices and even
find new customers and sales targets. As the quantity of data
businesses can collect continues to grow, having an effective data
warehousing system that can be easily mined has become increasingly
critical to business success.
Data Warehouse
What is a data warehouse?
• Top tier: The top tier is represented by some kind of front-end user
interface or reporting tool, which enables end users to conduct ad-
hoc data analysis on their business data.
Data Mart
• The data mart is that portion of the access layer of the data
warehouse which is utilized by the end user. Therefore, data mart is
a subset of the data warehouse. Data mart is usually assigned to a
specific business unit within the enterprise. Data mart is used to slice
data warehouse into a different business unit. Typically, ownership of
the data mart is given to that particular business unit or department.
1. Flat Files: They are data files in text form or binary and
represented by data dictionary (e.g: CSV file).
Layman Terms defines what had happened and breaks down contributing
factors.
The report generated by a Business Intelligence solution could be a
visualization.
The main purpose of data visualization is to communicate
information clearly and effectively through graphical means. But
that doesn’t mean that data visualization needs to look boring to
be functional or extremely sophisticated to look beautiful.