What is BI - Business Intelligence?
BI is an abbreviation of the two words Business Intelligence, bringing the right information at the right time to the right people in the right format. It is a 5-step process to run your business smarter, starting with registering the right data correctly, collecting the data from multiple sources, transforming, combineing and storing it in a data warehouse. This data should be reported, analysed and distributed to the right people at the right time in the right format. The figure below shows these steps.
Business Intelligence is about connecting people using a proper information infrastructure and performance driven culture, enabling them working more closely together towards company and personal goals. The successfactors of business intelligence are described in our research paper 'Making business intelligence successful'. Different applications and tools may exist in a business intelligence infrastructure. These are all covered in the BI Tool Survey Report.
Basic Business Intelligence
This type of application is mainly used to understand the business processes, and the operational results, of the organisation. This basic application contains often just a collection of reports, used for operational purposes.
Corporate performance management (CPM)
An application used to optimise the business processes of an organisation, and more importantly to align strategy with execution, and vice versa. Key performance indicators (KPI's), key result indicators (KRI's) and performance indicators (PI) are defined in order to see how things are going, in perspective of each other. Once you have this type of application running, you can alter and execute strategies more quickly. In a fast changing environment, this will not be an overkill.
Customer Analytics / CRM
For each organisation, customers should be considered and treated as the most important business partner. Because of that, many organisations understand that to be fully customer oriented, they should have a 360 degree view of the customer. This BI application, often implemented side by side with a Customer Relationship management system, collects all the customer data that a organisation registers, combine it and display it to the users in different formats.
Marketing intelligence
An application to measure the effectiveness of the marketing activities, for example to measure the relationship between ads and the revenue by product. With marketing intelligence, we measure and analyse also market shares, market growth, brand awareness, the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and product portfolio. With this application we can get a clear view of the contribution of marketing to the other activities of the company.
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)
This application, often called BAM, makes it possible to discover real-time or near real-time what is happening in daily operations. Mostly used to report sudden deviations in critical business processes from the standard patterns or norms, for example a sudden increase of the back log, or a decrease of the stock of some specific medicins. Thanks to BAM, people can get alerted before things are getting real worse.
BI for the supply chain
Pivotal in this application is integration of information with your business partners in a very structured way, using the internet, to enable a more smoothly running supply chain. It can support better vendor management, monitor stocks in the entire supply chain, give more flexibility to connect new vendors in the chain, enhance the speed and reliability of deliveries, and a on-demand supply chain.
Metadata management
Information about all the data that is processed, from source systems to target reports and dashboard, is often put into a metadata repository; a database containing all the metadata. The entire process can be 'managed' with metadata management, for example one can query how a specific key performance indicator (KPI) is built-up in the process, called data lineage. Or, you want to know what the impact of a change will be, for example the size of the order identifier (id) is changed, and in which steps this attribute plays a role.
