BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE TOOLS FOR DATA ANALYSIS AND DECISION MAKING

• Main Authors: DEJAN ZDRAVESKI, IGOR ZDRAVKOSKI
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Nicolae Titulescu University Publishing House 2011-04-01
• Series: Challenges of the Knowledge Society
• Subjects: Business intelligence; application; decision making; knowledge; data mining; data warehouse
• Online Access: http://cks.univnt.ro/uploads/cks_2011_articles/index.php?dir=02_economy%2F&download=cks_2011_economy_art_006.pdf

Every business is dynamic in nature and is affected by various external and internal factors. These factors include external market conditions, competitors, internal restructuring and re-alignment, operational optimization and paradigm shifts in the business itself. New regulations and restrictions, in combination with the above factors, contribute to the constant evolutionary nature of compelling, business-critical information; the kind of information that an organization needs to sustain and thrive. Business intelligence (“BI”) is broad term that encapsulates the process of gathering information pertaining to a business and the market it functions in. This information when collated and analyzed in the right manner, can provide vital insights into the business and can be a tool to improve efficiency, reduce costs, reduce time lags and bring many positive changes. A business intelligence application helps to achieve precisely that. Successful organizations maximize the use of their data assets through business intelligence technology. The first data warehousing and decision support tools introduced companies to the power and benefits of accessing and analyzing their corporate data. Business users at every level found new, more sophisticated ways to analyze and report on the information mined from their vast data warehouses.Choosing a Business Intelligence offering is an important decision for an enterprise, one that will have a significant impact throughout the enterprise. The choice of a BI offering will affect people up and down the chain of command (senior management, analysts, and line managers) and across functional areas (sales, finance, and operations). It will affect business users, application developers, and IT professionals. BI applications include the activities of decision support systems (DSS), query and reporting, online analyticalprocessing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining. Another way of phrasing this is that BI applications take data that is generated by the operations of an enterprise and translate that data into relevant and useful information for consumption by people throughout the enterprise.