What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence is the ability of an organisation to extract meaning from its data. In today's marketplace the ability of management to examine their organisations data, and make informed decisions based on that examination, is critical. Business Intelligence is a key part of the corporate information strategy.

Development of Business Intelligence
The development of Business Intelligence has been driven by the demands of management. Managers are turning to Business Intelligence solutions in the struggle to keep in touch with complex and diverse business operations in a changing business environment. Key driving factors include:

• industry consolidation and globalisation
• information and communication technology development
• emergence of the new "High Tech" economy
• development of a customer-centric approach
• quest for competitive advantage.

Corporate Information Pyramid
The structure of corporate information can be seen as a pyramid.

1. At the base of the pyramid, transaction databases accumulate the raw data generated from business operations.
2. Data warehouses organise the raw data into information.
3. Business Intelligence (BI) and Online Analytic Processing (OLAP) products are used to analyse the information and create knowledge.
4. Management at the top of the pyramid evaluates knowledge to guide action and decision making.

Management occupies the top of the pyramid, but the complexity of corporate data and database systems means that the body of the pyramid is occupied by technicians. The technical layers hinder exploration of the data block the extraction of valuable corporate intelligence. The goal of Business Intelligence is to unlock the potential stored in corporate data by empowering management to rapidly and creatively explore the data and extract business insight.

Shortcomings of Current Business Intelligence Solutions

Current BI and OLAP products are failing to meet management demands:

• long and expensive consultancies are normally required to implement or change the Business Intelligence solutions
• the products do not deliver insight because their capacity to perform meaningful statistical analysis is limited
• management is frustrated because the products make it difficult for them to focus on and explore critical business developments
• the maintenance costs are often unreasonably high.