As the semester grains traction and we move into the third week of the classes, I am for sure trying hard to garner the required momentum for the rest of the four months.
Of course the class this time starts with the standard and basic question - "What is BI"?. I know there is know single hard and fast definition for this but we will go with the "Wisdom of the Crowds" consensus in defining it
" Business intelligence refers to the class of Tools, Technologies and Techniques required for Collection, measurement, understanding and analysis of data used by firms for either tracking or predicting performance"
This definition encompasses a very broader view of BI but of course as the saying goes the more broad something is the more vague it tends to be. Hence it throws up a myriad of questions like - "What are the Tools?" "What are the Techniques?", "How do you analyse data?" etc.,So let us slice the different parts of the definition so that we have a preliminary understanding of these. This way I guess we will have the agenda for the rest of the semester.
What are the Tools used in BI?
There is no hard and fast list of tools or a comprehensive list of tools documented. In fact the choice of the tool used depends on the metrics the firm is interested in tracking and predicting. How ever the most basic tool used by any company to track its Website metrics is Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/). This has the most comprehensive list of web metrics for your Website visits and slices and dices the data in different ways. Other commercial BI tools include Microsoft BI Suite, Microstrategy BI Platform, Inetsoft etc., For a pretty comprehensive list of tools, click here .
What are BI Technologies and name a few technologies used?
Technologies here refer to data integration,data quality, data warehousing, text and content analytics etc., There is no hard and fast definition of a Technology.
What are Techniques used in BI?
There are actually a myriad of them. Predictive Modelling, Descriptive data mining, Association, Correlation and OLAP are a few. For a more comprehensive list refer to this.
I would not certainly go into collection, measurement, analysis and prediction as that would be the topic of my posts for the coming weeks but one last thing that will conclude this post is the KPI.
What is KPI?
Key Performance Indicators are used by the industry to measure performance on one or more dimensions. They evaluate the success of a company on that particular dimension. Click here for a more comprehensive understanding of KPIs.
As always, I conclude this post with some interesting links for this week.
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