Data Warehouse Essay

Business intelligence (BI) merges architectures, tools, databases, analytical tools, applications, and methodologies. It also is context free like DSS. BI deduces the connections between business entities by evaluating copious volumes of historical data which supports decisions. BI has four major components consisting of a data warehouse, business analytics, business performance management, and a user interface.

Business Intelligence (BI) is the consolidation and analysis of internal data and / or external data for the purpose of effective decision-making. At the core of all BI initiatives is a data warehouse to hold the data and analytics software. The data warehouse stores data from operational systems in the organization and restructures it to enable queries and models to extract decision support reports.

A data warehouse is a large databased organized for reporting. It preserves history, integrates data from multiple sources, and is typically not updated in real time. The key components of data warehousing is the ability to access data of the operational systems, data staging area, data presentation area, and data access tools (HIMSS, 2009). The goal of the data warehouse platform is to improve the decision-making for clinical, financial, and operational purposes.

Design, code and deliver user friendly multi-tier business intelligence solutions that utilize data warehouse/data mining technologies to consume data across various database platforms and data stores.

Business analytics on the other hand, as defined on Wikipedia (2012, Aug 06) "refers to the skills, technologies, applications and practices for continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive business planning." It goes on to state that, "Business analytics focuses on developing new insights and understanding of business performance based on data and statistical methods." This is in contrast to business intelligence and stated above. Business intelligence answers questions such as what happened, , how often, how many, where the problem is, and what needs to happen next. Business analytics answers questions like why is this happening, what if these trends continue, what might

The addition of a BI platform to an organizations existing software can greatly improve the functionality of those programs. In Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platform” article, they define the main uses of BI platforms as:

Business intelligence systems have quite a few systems under their umbrella, they can sometimes be very involved as they identify, extract and analyze data for various operational needs, principally for decision-making purposes. These types of information systems may predict future sales patterns, or forecast sales. For example, financial institutions use business intelligence systems to develop credit risk models that analyze the number and extent of lending or credit given to various customers. These systems may use various techniques and formulas to determine the probability of loan defaults.

R.L Fielding (2008) reiterates that Business Intelligence is a thorough and holistic analysis of the company records, data, information, and software application for effective decision making. All decision making processes need an organized, readily-accessible, and human readable compilations of data. With the use of an effective tool the firm can easily figure out their own business processes, the behavior of their customers, and the economic trend of the industry. With these facts, the firm can arrive at a better strategy to achieve their specified goals with confidence.

Business intelligence systems combine operational data with analytical tools to present complex and competitive information to planners and decision makers. Their objective is to improve the timeliness and quality of the input to the decision process. Business Intelligence is used to understand the capabilities available in the firm; the state of the art, trends, and future directions in the markets, the technologies, and the regulatory environment in which the firm competes; and the actions of competitors and the implications of these actions. The emergence of the data warehouse as a repository, the advances in data cleansing, the increased capabilities of

Business Intelligence is gaining popularity in many organizations and companies. Business Intelligence solutions are developed to help the organizations understand their customers, activities and performance. BI solutions act as measurements units for a business or an organization. Deficient intelligence leads to weak decision making. BI has

Furthermore, the Gartner website argues that “BI has become a strategic initiative and is now recognised by chief information officers (CIOs) and business leaders as instrumental in driving business effectiveness and innovation,” (Anon., 2007). Gartner also argues that “BI projects were the number one technology priority for 2007” (Anon., 2007). According to the Bill Inmon, data warehouse is “a subject-oriented, integrated, time variant and non-volatile collection of data used in strategic decision making”. Hammergen & Simon, (2009) define data warehouse more simpler by saying that “ Data warehousing is therefore the process of creating an architected information management solution to enable analytical and information processing despite platform, application, organizational, and other barriers.“ It is important to note that data warehouse system is different from relational database. The reasons of that are: (1) In the data warehouse data is stored for long term; (2) DW is designed for high performance for analytical queries; (3) its OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) technology enables to view data in various form; (4) linking between tables are simple (Tushman, 2014). Databases, in contrast, have a low performance regarding data analysis; joins between tables are

Business intelligence can provide companies with accurate data that can be analyzed to support business strategy therefore enabling companies to better predict effectiveness of their business goals and ultimately result in a business profit. “Business intelligence is already in use in many organizations today, by finance departments to analyze financial performance, sales and marketing to identify customer trends, and operations to enhance the efficiency of supply chains. Using real data helps them answer who, what, where, why and when of related performance” (Rylander,2009).

Data warehouse are multiple databases that work together. In other words, data warehouse integrates data from other databases. This will provide a better understanding to the data. Its primary goal is not to just store data, but to enhance the business, in this case, higher education institute, a means to make decisions that can influence their success. This is accomplished, by the data warehouse providing architecture and tools which organizes and understands the

Business Intelligence (BI) is defined by IBM as, “the discipline that combines services, applications and technologies to gather, manage and analyze data, transforming it into usable information to develop insight and understanding needed to make informed decisions.” (IBM.com, 2006) In its most basic form, BI is an umbrella principle that synergizes the core understanding of your business, including all of its facets, and acting on what that foundation is made up of.

Data warehousing is an efficient system which store the past as well as current data used for creating reports. Data warehousing system is used for decision making by analyzing the reports. A data warehouse is a relational database, which is designed for analysis and query. It helps an organization to consolidate and analyze data from different sources and make decision. A data warehouse environment consists of OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) engine, ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Loading) process, client analysis tools and other applications that manage gathering and delivering the data.