Concepts of Business Intelligence

  

Business Intelligence is like an information scratch pad. Many people  struggle with the concepts of business Intelligence, the activity of gathering business data in a sensible way that can be used to make decisions

Like most things abstract, the process and outcomes may differ from person to person so in the end it is a personal definition.In a business performance sense however it is useful to decompose it into the activity rather than the process or science it covers.The process of reporting data is called reporting e.g. the printed phone bill. The process of analysis of data is called Data Analysis The ability to do both in combination to provide analytical reporting is generally the same as Business Intelligence  Here are some examples of business intelligence related to an improved financial proposition

Car costs

A person who drive a car knows fuel is consumes at higher rates depending on a number of variables, like speed, number of stops and starts tyre pressure, road conditions etc. And the relative value is also a factor such as cost benefit.In the latter case someone who is not in a hurry will choose to not pay the toll.  This may be false economy as slow stop start traffic will increase the fuel burn. Without analysis this behaviour outcome may become the accepted bad practice.

Coffee Shop

A coffee shop may intuitively understand their customer need and by observation when they get the mid morning and mid afternoon meeting sessions from the offices as people seek common ground.Take the case of the shop with a very pleasant green outdoor feel with an artificial waterfall at one end of the shop where the tables are always first filled by nearby business people having offsite meetings in mid morning and mid afternoons. They noted that when the waterfall is turned off people go to the opposition across the road indicating people like the feel and atmosphere.By contrast the opposition coffee shop which is across the road only has a few lounge chairs and piped music had fewer atmospheres but was always full.  So the waterfall ship installed canned music too and both shops became full and the nearby park tables became was less occupied. The first owner then applied some business sense to the real reason and immediately put some tables outside on the pavement near the traffic and the business flourished and he got neighbouring people coming too. Using simple business intelligence he figured pleasant white noise in and pleasant environment, provided customers what they wanted. A neutral open territory to talks with some privacy.

Corporate phone bill

1. 1. Number calling tells us what phone makes the call
   2. Location where the parties are literally
   3. Service  tells us the service used mobile, international etc
   4. Timestamp tells us when the call was made
   5. Time tells how long we spent on the activity
   6. Cost gives us the unit cost of the call

   Another more mundane example is the company phone bill. A list of a company 20000 phone call transitions has no value to us unless we add some intelligence to it. A total of the time spent and costs give us some insights but we still need want more detail to understand the source and value of the phone call activity.So when we take a look at the breakdown of a phone call transaction it tells us something.  Number called, tells us who we interact with:

With that information we are now very well equalled to do some analysis and apply some intelligent decisions to improve our behaviours  But of course we need a tool for that such a spreadsheet so we can sort and group things in an intelligent way. And to assess the value of the activity overall for alternatives to improve or remove redundant value activity and vary our behaviour to get a better result.

If we load the data into an access database to create a pivot table in a  spreadsheet and also connect this database with clients and department, activity data we could associated phone activity to provide very valuable information. The phone bill analysis itself  by adding up and comparing aspects or dimensions provides useful information that can be used intelligently. With added relevant external data the intelligence value is so much more valuable and an immediately useful as information and to plan actions, when it shows up in the analysis.

But unlike the coffee shop or the driver where that activity and the variables is fairly intuitive the myriad of combinations of service departments and clients integrations make in is nearly impossible to understanding all the talk activity that is going on to make it all happen. Hence for joining all the dots and allowing us to permutate our inquiries as we change perspectives we need some good tools

Software applications using sophisticated visualization capability for online analytical interactive reporting with analytical databases processing and arranging huge transaction data sources in real-time, combine to bring together and deliver business intelligence.