Business Intelligence - Architecture, Components and its Benefits

Introduction

The current business environment is constantly evolving. The global economic scenario is providing opportunities as well as challenges. The factors affecting business environment are consumer needs, globalization, and government policies, etc.

In such a business environment, organization basically has four action steps. The organization can be reactive, anticipative, adaptive, or/and proactive. For this, organization can develop a new strategy, get into partnership, etc.

Today most of the businesses are having a computerized business support. This support is in form of decision support system, business analysis, etc.

The main objective of business intelligence is to bridge the gap between organization current status and its desired position. Business intelligence helps organization achieve commercial success along with sound financial management.

Business intelligence is framework designed to support decision-making process. This framework combines architecture, database, analytical tools and applications. Business analytics forms an integral part of business intelligence.

Framework of Business Intelligence

More and more businesses are moving towards business intelligence. The reason for this movement is the business environment. Organizations are forced to capture, store and interpret data. This data is at the core of business success. Organizations require correct information for any decision-making process.

Business intelligence combines data warehousing, business analytics, performance, strategy and user interface. Business receives data from various sources. This data is capture in the data warehouse where it is stored, organized and summarized as per further utilization. Authorized users can access this data and work on it to get desired results. This result than are shared to executives for decision-making process. These data results can be published through dashboards or share points.

Business Intelligence Architecture and Components

The main components of business intelligence are data warehouse, business analytics and business performance management and user interface.

Data warehouse holds data obtained from internal sources as well as external sources. The internal sources include various operational systems.

Business analytics creates a report as and when required through queries and rules. Data mining is also another important aspect of business analytics.

Business performance management is a linkage of data with business objectives for efficient tracking. This business performance is then broadcasted to an executive decision-making body through dashboards and share-point.

Benefit of Business Intelligence

The benefits of Business intelligence are as follows:

• Business intelligence is faster more accurate process of reporting critical information.
• Business intelligence facilitates better and efficient decision-making process.
• Business intelligence provides timely information for better customer relationship management.
• Business intelligence improves profitability of the company.
• Business intelligence provides a facility of assessing organization’s readiness in meeting new business challenges.
• Business intelligence supports usage of best practices and identifies every hidden cost.

Business intelligence usage can be optimized by identifying key projects on which company would like to focus. This process of highlighting key projects is called business intelligence governance.

The importance of business intelligence is growing, and its usage has proliferated across various types of users. Earlier, it was in the domain of IT staff, but now business team is also independently handling business intelligence.