Page 7 - DCAP606_BUSINESS_INTELLIGENCE

Business Intelligence

Notes Business Intelligence (BI) technologies provide chronicled, present and predictive view of business
operations. Common functions of enterprise Intelligence technologies are reporting, online
analytical processing, analytics, data excavation, process excavation, business performance
management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics.

1.1 Meaning of Business Intelligence

BI (Business Intelligence) refers to set of techniques which assist in spotting, digging out and
investigating best data from the large amount of data to improve conclusion making. Let us
understand the concept better with help of an example.

Example: Suppose we have chronicled data of a Shopping Mart of 3-6 months. Here, in
the data we have different products with their respective specifications. Let us select one of the
products-say Candles. We have three kinds of Candles in this class say Candle A, Candle B,
Candle C. On studying of these data we come to know that sale of Candle C was at peak out of
these three classes. Now on afresh and deep study into these data we got the outcome that the
sale of this Candle C was maximum between the time intervals of 9 am to 11 am. On further
deeper analysis, we came to the conclusion that this specific Candle is the one used in place of
worship.
Now, let’s apply Business Intelligence for this analysis. What an enterprise firm or the organization
can do is, get other material that can be used in church and place them nearby those candles.
Now the customers approaching the Shopping Mart to purchase the candles for place of worship
can also have a look on the other material and may be tempted to purchase them as well. Now
this will surely enhance the sales and hence the income of Shopping Mart.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. .................................. can handle large amounts of data to help identify and evolve new
opportunities for the business.
2. BI (Business Intelligence) refers to set of techniques which assist in ....................., digging
out and ........................ best data from the large amount of data to improve conclusion
making.

1.2 History of Business Intelligence

Normally, early business applications had their own databases that supported their functions.
These databases became “islands of information” in that no other systems had access to them.
These islands of information proliferated as more and more departments were automated.

Did u know? Amalgamations and acquisitions aggregated the difficulty since the companies
integrated completely distinct systems, numerous of which were doing the similar job.
However, businesses shortly identified the analytical value of the data that they had access to.
In fact, as enterprises automated more systems, more data became accessible. However, collecting
these data for analysis was a challenge because of the incompatibilities amidst systems.

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