What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence is a broad set of applications, technologies and knowledge for gathering and analyzing data for the purpose of helping users make better business decisions.
The main challenge of Business Intelligence is to gather and serve organized information regarding all relevant factors that drive the business and enable end-users to access that knowledge easily and efficiently and in effect maximize the success of an organization.

Business intelligence produces analysis and provides in depth knowledge about performance indicators such as company's customers, competitors, business counterparts, economic environment and internal operations to help making effective and good quality business decisions.

From a technical standpoint, the most important areas that Business Intelligence (BI) covers are:

  • DW - Data warehousing - architecture, modeling, managing, processing
  • ETL process and data integration
  • Reporting, Information visualization and Dashboards
  • OLAP - Online Analytical Processing and multidimensional analysis
  • Data cleansing and data quality management
  • Performance management
  • Data mining, statistical analysis, forecasting
  • MIS - Management Information Systems
  • CRM - Customer Relationship Management

    • Etl Tools Info portal

    ETL Tools portal provides information about different business intelligence tools and datawarehousing solutions, with a main focus on ETL process and tools. On our pages you will find both general articles with high-level information on various Business Intelligence applications and architectures, as well as technical documents, with a low-level description of the presented solutions and detailed tutorials.
    A great attention is paid to the Datastage and Informatica Powercenter ETL tools with a number of examples, tutorials, best practices and resolved problems with real-life scenarios.
    There is also a wide range of information on a rapidly growing Open Source Business Intelligence market (OSBI), with emphasis on applications from the Pentaho BI family, including a Pentaho tutorial.
    We also provide a SAS Guide with tutorial, which illustrates the vision of SAS on Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing and ETL process.
    ETL case study (ETL and data warehousing training) section which represents a set of business cases, each of which illustrates a typical data warehousing problem followed by sample implementations. We analyze the cases thoroughly and propose the most efficient and appropriate approach to solving that problems by showing sample ETL process designs and DW architectures.
    Microsoft users may be very interested in exploring our Excel BI crosstabs section with FAQ and sample solutions.