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Business Intelligence (BI) applications are decision support tools that enable real-time, interactive access to and analysis of mission-critical corporate information. Business intelligence applications bridge the gaps between information silos in an organization. Their sophisticated analytical capabilities and access to corporate information resources, such as data warehouses, transaction processing applications, & enterprise applications such as ERP enable users to access and leverage vast amounts of data to analyze business relationships and trends, gaining insight into potential sales opportunities and areas for business process refinement. This information is typically utilized:
- To support internal enterprise users in the assessment, enhancement, and optimization of organizational performance and operations.
- To deliver critical business information to end-users about value chain constituencies (e.g. customers and supply chain partners).
BI applications can be classified as follows:
- Personalized dashboards for process monitoring and highlighting exceptions
- Decision support with drill-down and what-if analysis
- Data-mining to understand and discover patterns and behaviors
- Automated agents to drive rule based business strategy via integrated processes
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| Challenges and Opportunities |
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While standardizing on a common BI platform, enterprises face multitude of challenges. Unlike transaction systems, the value of BI capabilities greatly depends on the business models and the style of the business executives. Therefore while timeliness of integrity of the data is important, it is equally important that the underlying BI implementation be flexible to changing business needs. Data integrity, definition and availability are key constraints in implementing BI applications. Another key challenge is to define a clear and concise model of user's information needs.
The concept of BI applications has existed for a long time, however, only now is the technology making it possible to implement systems flexible enough to be usable across the enterprise. Key opportunities in BI applications are as follows:
- Implement performance management and reward systems driven by individual and team score cards
- Data mining and pattern and trend recognition across operational process, e.g. consumer behavior and supply chain performance
- Executive dash-boards to make real-time monitoring of enterprise performance
- Budgeting and planning applications to promote collaboration
- Automated agents to drive rule based business strategy via integrated processes
- Improve effectiveness of decision making
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- Flexible architecture and design
- Combination of both business and technical skills within the team
- Involvement of business managers to review business and data model
- Business centric view of the data model
- Data Integration to maintain data integrity and timeliness
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- Enterprise BI capability Assessment and Planning
- BI Architecture Planning
- Business Area specific needs analysis and business modeling
- Data warehouse and ETL initiatives Planning
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- Ability to connect with business executives
- An in-depth understanding of BI technologies
- Understanding of BI management concepts such as balanced scorecards and ABC
- Ability to translate business models into usable, collaborate applications
- Ability to synthesize business needs with technology alternatives
- Strong Methodology
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Ph: 630.652.0450
Fx: 630.652.0960
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All product and company names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
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1900 S. Highland Avenue, Suite 105
Lombard, IL 60148
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