Chronological Definition Business Intelligence

Is BI only related to Dashboards, metrics and reports or it also includes designing of robust data warehouse ?

It took me 10 days to research and 30 mins to write this blog, not sure how folks are able to chalk down all the stuff so quickly with my experience writing a blog is collecting information from different sources and present a unified view, rather than post what was the lecture about anyways, I have been posting lot of grad level doubts on linked in but this was the most commented one. The very first question when I started working as BI analyst was What is Business Intelligence ?

To summarize this blog I would keep the title as Chronological definition of Business Intelligence. My journey with this word started somewhere in September 2009 when I started my job as BI Developer for my client, initially

I was into the database integration of OLAP and OLTP system, for the real time BI solution after 4 months of profile I started BI is to provide real time data to the business users, which is one of the domain that quantifies Business Intelligence, means leveraging the business with advantage of real time business data ( adding intelligence to the business )

I then moved to the ETL team ( Extract Tranform and Load ) which does nothing but takes the raw data from the business OLTP and process that and make it meaningful information for the business again adding value to the business objective ( adding intelligence to the business ).

My third profile where I spend some of the quality timing was reporting, which of course many think that is the end of BI, then I thought of defining BI as set of practice where we visualize data on fancy dasboard, of course it requires complex capability to that and they are highly paid also. Another definition I formulated was use of reporting tool is BI to help business make correct decision ( adding intelligence to Business ).

All these definition were correct but not correct, with the same question I posted this on the Linked profile, trust me at present 46 replies are there with all different definition and scope for BI, which brings me back to the same question for BI - " What is Business Intelligence" , some of the domain where we can define Business Intelligence as per the threads are

Data warehouse Architecture viewpoint

Almost every one talked about the design of Data warehouse, obviously if you can not store it you cannot view it, be it the most expensive reporting tool or be it the highest paid data analyst. So defining Business Intelligence in terms of design of database is not wrong although its not complete also.

ETL Developer viewpoint

The definition of the BI holds good for some one who is in this domain, to be very honest I personally feel this is where BI starts, no matter what is the architecture of the warehouse, if business logic is not implemented, the dashboard shows nothing, which includes real time data ( much talked about these days )

Business Reporting

Most elusive and easily considered to be the core part of BI, since its the face of business intelligence with fancy dasboards, expensive tools we feel tools and technology that incorporates data visualization is Business Intelligence, correct but not fully qualified.

Web Mining ( BI 2.0 )

The process of effective decision making now days is not only dependent on internal data but also external data, use of API to mine data and make decision is one of the hot topics in Business Intelligence, but again going to my earlier viewpoints until you don't process them its use less so a good defination but not fully qualified.

Data Analysis

Now you have all the data from the world, all processed, visualized how to make sure that the business policy and business decisions are correct, were the KPI ( another Jargon used in my class ) correct if not how do we redefine them, what will be the future trend, how to forecast the demands. I call all this is predictive analysis, doing all the above and missing this step will not be a complete BI solution.

Well till date I am still not sure how to define the term Business Intelligence, that's what our Prof also said, BI is a huge umbrella, definition depends what aspect are you considering.

Still I will not conclude the definition of BI, probably I will wait for the semester to end, but I am sure I will be still on the same page.

Hope this was a good attempt to define Business Intelligence.

Regards,

Sg.