What is business Intelligence........?
(What?)(Still Confused...)
Many definitions of B.I seem pretty long,
very technical and difficult to understand..... (After reading from the
Wikipedia page) then you ask yourself; is that what it takes for a business to be
intelligent?
So we begin to ask ourselves what
intelligence is first..
- Is it about knowledge and understanding? ...Meaning and context? …Foresight? ...To solve complex problems to make decisions? …
- Well who make decisions? Typically people make decision (Unless you are the Terminator!)
- Or how do people make decisions...to use your last life-line, or walk away? ...hold, sell or buy? Sometimes we make poor decisions.
So we can say Intelligence leads to Decisions
and Decisions are made by People.
- So what makes a good decision? How about information?
So can we say Intelligence + Information =
Right Decision?
- What is Information? Information is used to share stories, to learn with books, to discover, keep track, and help provide answers to unlock secrets which allows for innovation from something big to small (Mainframe Computers to microchips) and to help build something big again(Sky scrapper buildings).
Information was all about answers and
answers allowed people to make decisions
- So how did business people get answers? They had business data!
Data about people, product, places!
- They also had questions…which products are the best? ….How is my sales doing? ...How are my people performing? But before they could get answers...They needed insight into their data otherwise it was guess work.
Data had value, it was precious! Where do you
put something precious? It had to be stored. Before the 1960s, Data was stored
in file cabinets, when computers arrived it was in places like diskettes, c.ds
etc. But storing data was risky and difficult to manage. Eventually data would
be stored in Databases (First invented by Edgar Codd, 1969, which was about the
first time man landed on the moon). So the database provided a way to store
business data about people, product and places. But it wasn't that straight
forward...to get data in database required some expertise and so in the 1970s
business applications was created (and so was disco!)
- Why Business applications?
They provided a better way to collect data.
So database was about storage; Business applications + Database = ease of data
entry and more data
- What about access?
Data + Access = Answers
From the beginning, Access wasn't easy. Data
was coming from multiple locations from business applications. Why not access
one-at-a-time? Reports were tried but it was one dimensional and provided
access in silos which meant they data was fragmented.
They needed more insightful access across
multiple locations. So they moved the data into a Data warehouse (Which was
made popular in the early 1980s). And so the data could be organized and come
from multiple locations to be managed and accessed in one location.
1989 the term BI was born. BI vendors
popped up with many providing more access across multiple locations to report
and analyze data.
Data = More data = more demand = more
faster = more performance
In summary BI tools created more access
reports with capabilities to collaborate, share, search and communicate about
their questions and answers between business people.
BI = Right Data + Right Time + Right person
Tag :
analysis,
business,
data,
decision,
information,
intelligence,
investment,
management,
nigeria,
qlikview,
roi,
simplex
1 Comment on "Evolution of B.I"
This provides a whole new concept of understanding B.I