Business Intelligence

What is it?

There is a series of generic areas of information systems that have been grouped into the marketspace called Business Intelligence. This term covers a wide subject area. Each could support a Web site of its own, and probably does. But this is a only a summary. This page characterises each of the market segments and provides links into an allied product list which shows the toolsets that could be used to satisfy a need in that segment.

Business Intelligence
	There are some tools which address the whole range of the Business Intelligence market. They tend to be large, expensive and well-established in this marketspace. These offerings often cover all of the sections outlined in this summary. Even if they don't cover them all, the chances are the vendors will say they do anyway.
EIS
	Executive Information Systems, Everyone's Information System. This area of the market is typified by click and point navigation allied with graphical presentation. Executive Information Systems provide uncluttered, structured access to focused data analyses. A good EIS should incorporate internal information, external information, historic data and future trend prediction.
DSS
	Power users want unfettered access to trusted data. Decision Support Systems provide this. They also often provide support for What-If Analyses and modelling of alternative scenarios. They focus on what the organisation knows, its history, its own data.
OLAP
	On Line Analytical Processing. A term coined by Ted Codd. For a detailed discourse on OLAP, see OLAP: the Panacea for the Ills of Management Information. OLAP technology often underpins DSS tools in particular but is also an essential part of EIS offerings. Key Characteristics are capabilities to store and present hypercubes of data.
Web Delivery
	Many Business Intelligence tools provide their output via browser technology aiming at corporate intranets or the Internet. There are some on-line demonstrations of this technology.
Data Mining
	Surrounded by data? Can't see the information for the data items? Don't know where to look for that key measure? There must be something in this mess somewhere? For unstructured exploration of potentially disparate data sets, data mining tools provide a way to find nuggets of unsuspected information. They help you look at data correlations and relationships in new ways using neural nets to make links you never knew existed. This technology is aimed at large data sets which are still to be explored. Notable success stories are in Retailing and in tracking down credit card and home loan fraud.
Data Warehouse
	Data Warehouses can be logical views of your underlying systems. But more significantly, for products, Data Warehouses have come to be massive stores of copies of operational data or summarised operational data which can be delivered out through a series of Data Marts which use EIS or DSS technology. Warehouses tend to use RDBMS while Marts exploit OLAP technology.
Extract / Transform / Transport
	As the Business Intelligence market develops and matures, niches are carved and acronyms proliferates. It is not always to satisfy the demands of the vendors' marketing department. Any organisation that has tried to build a data warehouse (or indeed any system that uses data produced by another) has come across the problems of data validation, data integrity, data cleansing, data porting and migration. This marketspace covers tools which map data to multiple sources and data structures, provide methods of transporting from one format to another and can apply business transformation rules to ease information integration.
Other
	There are a range of Tools which do not fall easily in to the above groupings. They would include tools such as Intelligent Agents, SQL Generators etc. "Helper " Tools such as AnswerSets have been put into this category since they are hard to categorize.
Vertical Markets
	One of the signs that a piece of information technology has become mature is the availability of packaged solutions using that technology. It is no longer the province of specialists. There are a series of products aiming at specific vertical markets. These are some of them.
All Products

Simon Groves, Savant, 1 Bow Court, Fletchworth Gate,Coventry, CV5 6SP, UK. Voice: +44 1203 718200

e-Mail: simong@savcov.demon.co.uk