Business Intelligence Essay

Information – business intelligence – is no longer the exclusive domain of IT or research departments. From marketing and finance to management and operations, intelligence is applied strategically throughout the enterprise. And professionals who know how to gather and leverage it are the ones who will lead organizations, control decisions, and be relied upon to steer their companies.

4. What does the term Business Intelligence mean? What tools does the Microsoft Business Intelligence suite that ships with SQL Server contain?

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.

Forecasting analytics will enable SYSCO to make appropriate upfront decisions and monitor customers as well as the industry. Extraction and data mining are also useful tools that will positively affect SYSCO’s decision-making process. Lastly, consulting support and employees’ training will facilitate the implementation of the new software in the company. For all these reasons, the use of BI at SYSCO can create a competitive advantage of the company in the industry. However, this competitive advantage depends on the competition – do the competitors use a similar software or by chance the same and do they already have a strong position in the market? Outperforming for example “U.S Food Service”, SYSCO’s main competitor, might be arduous if that company relies on a similar software and already has an eminent role in the

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.

First off, why do we need a business intelligence system for our business? Simply put, an effective

Intelligence analysis?is the process of taking known information about situations and bodies of strategic, operational, or tactical importance, characterizing the known, and, with appropriate statements of probability, the future actions in those situations and by those entities (Richards, 2010).?The descriptions are drawn from what may only be available in the form of deliberately deceptive information; the?analyst?must correlate the similarities among deceptions and extract a common truth. Although its practice is found in its purest form inside national?intelligence agencies, its methods are also applicable in fields such as business intelligence?or?competitive intelligence.

As we discuss the possibility of emerging into business intelligence software we must keep in mind the overall purpose of using any type of software is to reach strategic goals in order to increase market shares. I will discuss how business intelligence software will allow us to meet those strategic goals. We will establish what type of information and analysis capabilities will be available once this business intelligence software is implemented. We will discuss hardware and system software that will be required to run specific business intelligence software. Lastly, I will give a brief synopsis on three vendors (IBM, Microsoft Microsoft and Oracle) that are dominating the business information software industry today.

We cannot all help but notice the steady decline in our market share for the past consecutive 11 quarters. Annual revenue has shrunk by 40% since we last saw a sales growth. Despite all the cost cutting measures that we have implemented we still continue to see a steep decline in sales. To make matters worse we do not know why, we do not know how and do not have any insight on what the competition is doing and how they are doing it. I’m proposing that we adopt a business intelligence system. This will allow us to see the state of our overall processes, and pinpoint areas of improvement or elimination. In short, business intelligence will allow us to better analyze the organization’s plans and results. I will provide us with insight into what is working correctly at the same time identifying potential problem areas

The Actionable Intelligence is distributed to decision-makers in this phase. Some practitioners called this phase ‘communication’, ‘intelligence dissemination’, ‘disseminating information’, ‘communicating the finished intelligence’ and ‘filtering and disseminating intelligence’.

Setting the context of Military or Governmental Intelligence aside, it is important to grasp that the word Intelligence is a word commonly used to define a mental process. Intelligence is a term, when used on a person, that is complimentary and often implies that the person has a substantial amount of knowledge and knows how to express it in a productive manner. This having been said, it is perhaps simpler to take the words ‘information’ and ‘analysis’ and see how they are associated with the term ‘intelligence’.

I was offered the newly created role of Business Intelligence Analyst due to my previous experience with SalesForce, a cloud-based Customer Relationship Management platform, and a reporting tool Crystal Reports. The firm was in the process of transitioning from “Out of the Box” SalesForce platform to a more customized version specifically for alternative investments space. From the

Business analytics is different to Business intelligence which also uses statistical methods. Business analytics uses statistical methods and data to arrive at fresh understanding and illumination of a situation, whereas business intelligence uses statical data to serve as querying, reporting or alerts. Business analytics, therefore, is, one may say, the detective side of business using the statistics to develop and progress the business or direct it in new directions rather than revamping it with existent and supportive data. Business intelligence, in other words, uses the data to inform stakeholders and others what is occurring with the business, what the action is, and what steps are being taken.

I went through various blogs and special interest groups that are formed around these two terms i.e. business intelligence and business analytics. One common thing that I found is that most of them consider business intelligence and analytics as distinct but connected tools. They described business intelligence as a tool that provides a way of amassing data to find information primarily through asking questions, reporting, and online analytical processes. On the other hand, business analytics take advantage of statistical and quantitative data for explanatory and predictive modeling. Analytics focuses on solutions-oriented capabilities which create value and convert information into knowledge. Moreover, both business

Business Intelligence, also referred to as BI, has been defined in many ways. The earliest definition comes from 1958. At this time business intelligence “was seen as the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide actions towards a desired goal” (Turning Data into Actionable Information). Business Intelligence encompasses the following elements: Reporting, Analysis, Data mining, Data Quality and interpretation, and Predictive Analysis” (Turning Data into Actionable Information). According to Ryan Mulcahy at CIO.com, “Business Intelligence, or BI, is an umbrella term that refers to a variety of