Chapter 13 Business Intelligence and Data Warehouses

Business Intelligence and Data Warehouses 432 Discussion Focus Start by discussing the need for business intelligence in a highly competitive global economy. Note that Business Intelligence (BI) describes a comprehensive, cohesive, and integrated set of applications used to capture, collect, integrate, store, and analyze data with the purpose of generating and presenting information used to support business decision making. As the names implies, BI is about creating intelligence about a business. This intelligence is based on learning and understanding the facts about a business environment. BI is a framework that allows a business to transform data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom. BI has the potential to positively affect a company's culture by creating “business wisdom” and distributing it to all users in an organization. This business wisdom empowers users to make sound business decisions based on the accumulated knowledge of the business as reflected on recorded facts (historic operational data). Table 13.1 in the text gives some real-world examples of companies that have implemented BI tools (data warehouse, data mart, OLAP, and/or data mining tools) and shows how the use of such tools benefited the companies.