Page 204 - DCAP307_PLANNING_AND_MANAGING_IT_INFRASTRUCTURE

Planning and Managing IT Infrastructure

Notes  It’s relatively cheap.
 It’s commonly used. You can easily send an Excel sheet to another person without
worrying whether the recipient knows how to read the numbers.

 It has most of the functionalities users need to display data.
In fact, it is still so popular that all third-party reporting/OLAP tools have an “export to
Excel” functionality. Even for home-built solutions, the ability to export numbers to Excel
usually needs to be built.
Excel is best used for business operations reporting and goals tracking.

 Reporting tool: Business intelligence involves using computer systems to analyse company
data, including financial data, budgeting and costs. Reporting tool is used to arrange
information into a readable format and distribute it to the people who need it. Business
Intelligence Reporting Tools (BIRT) are the software systems responsible for doing this
work; these systems analyse the data and output reports based on their findings. Standard
BIRT tools involve data mining, reporting, spreadsheets and Online Analytical Processing
(OLAP). While some of these tools are free, you must pay for most of them.

Business operations reporting and dashboard are the most common applications for a
reporting tool.
 Business Performance: This type of business intelligence tool has really started to
catch on and has been a terrific way to organise, automate and analyse key business
methods and processes that greatly impact business performance.

Example: Applying business performance management allows corporations to optimise
the use of financial, materials and human resource capital.
 Digital Dashboards: Digital dashboards are popular business intelligence tools,
especially among top management because they are visual and easy to read. In one
quick summary, key decision makers can instantly get a visual display of performance
measures, identify key trends, generate detailed reports and gain insight into all of
the company’s systems from their desktops.
 OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) tool: OLAP tools are usually used by advanced
users. They make it easy for users to look at the data from multiple dimensions. OLAP
tools are used for multidimensional analysis. These are multi-dimensional analytical
tools, typically used in data mining that gather and process vast amounts of information
into useful packets.

 ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) Tool: ETL tools bring in data from outside sources,
transform it to meet your specified operational needs, and then load the results into your
company database.

 Metadata Tools: As the name suggests, these tools gather and analyse metadata, helping
to increase data quality.

Task Make distinction between OLAP tool and ETL tool.

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