Business Intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) processes monitor and analyze business transaction processes to ensure that they are optimized to meet the business goals of the organization. These goals may be operational goals that affect daily business operations, tactical goals that involve short-term programs such as marketing campaigns, or strategic goals that entail long-term objectives like increasing revenues and reducing costs.

This is a kind of predictive analytics which helps to give idea about most critical factors affecting the growth. Business intelligence is proved to be beneficial in decision making. We analyze all data like orders, inventory, accounts, and point of sale transactions and also of customers.

Key Performance Indicators is a term used in business intelligence. KPI are the metrics reflecting strategic performance of an organization. It is needed for the evaluation of current business performance and also in making action plan for further growth. These factors are found useful in evaluating the performance of different variable which are involved in growth.

To date, most BI processes have focused on reporting and analyzing business operations, i.e., measuring business performance. The direction of the industry is toward managing business performance by using business intelligence to align business operations with the tactical and strategic goals of the organization. This is achieved by extracting transaction data, and integrating it in a data warehouse for processing by BI performance management applications. These BI applications convert the integrated, but raw, warehouse data into actionable business information that shows how actual business performance compares with business goals and forecasts.

Business users employ their business expertise to evaluate the actionable business information produced by BI performance management applications. Applying business expertise to business information creates business knowledge. This knowledge can be used to determine what actions (if any) need to be taken to align business activities with business goals, and what business processes need to be modified to support those actions. This creates a so-called closed-loop decision making

and action-taking system for managing and optimizing business operations.

An efficient and integrated closed-loop system must enable a business to work smarter by closely aligning business performance to tactical and strategic business goals. This creates a feedback loop where positive activities are recognized and encouraged, while value-detracting activities are either improved or eliminated.

The need for organizations to be more agile, however, requires that this closed-loop process also be employed to optimize day-to-day business activities. At present, most data warehouses do not provide the near-real-time or low-latency transaction data required for such processing. The solution is to use BI applications against live transaction data, or to capture transaction data in-flight, and integrate it into a low latency data store (which may be an extension to an existing data warehouse).

Business intelligence applications provide new and calculative approach and helps in business development. BI results in following benefits.

* Better decision making

* Increase in revenue

* Reduction in costs

Three types of business intelligence (BI) exist, according to the general consensus of the IT industry: strategic, tactical and operational. Strategic BI and tactical BI are typically used in combination by senior managers and business analysts to help them achieve