business intelligence (BI)

Business Intelligence(BI) is a company-wide concept that regulates the access, analysis and reporting of company data stored in the company. The most important aspects of a BI concept are the integration of individual solutions for the management and control of business processes and the consolidation of all information technology tools.

The entire business intelligence infrastructure is subject to careful planning and monitoring of strategic requirements during the implementation phase. The entire planning aims at a consistent strategy including organizational and technical requirements. This includes data integration as well as data quality under the aspect of rapidly increasing data volumes. In addition, there are tasks such as the consolidation of isolated data marts, the integration of new data sources, the combination of information technology tools as well as the output of business data in the shortest possible time.

In order to implement a BI solution, the company's key performance indicators need to be determined and documented. Furthermore, the knowledge about the structure of the data streams, the analysis of the data quality and the cleansing of the data from the data warehouse as well as the definition of the operative interfaces. Important business areas must be converted to the data warehouse for which the development of analysis procedures is required. The use of the analysis procedures and the results represent the end points of BI realization.

The BI tools include software with which large amounts of data can be collected and used as in data warehousing, so Online Analytical Processing( OLAP) with which data can be examined according to various aspects. Furthermore, query tools for the creation of question patterns, data mining for the automatic search for correlations and patterns and visual analytics for the visual representation of complex correlations of large amounts of data.