Business intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) mainly refers to computer-based techniques used in identifying, extracting,and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments, or by associated costs and incomes.

     

BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining and predictive analytics.

Business intelligence aims to support better business decision-making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system (DSS). Though the term business intelligence is sometimes used as a synonym for competitive intelligence, because they both support decision making, BI uses technologies, processes, and applications to analyze mostly internal, structured data and business processes while competitive intelligence gathers, analyzes and disseminates information with a topical focus on company competitors. Business intelligence understood broadly can include the subset of competitive intelligence.

In a 1958 article, IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn used the term business intelligence. He defined intelligence as: "the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal."

Business intelligence as it is understood today is said to have evolved from the decision support systems which began in the 1960s and developed throughout the mid-80s. DSS originated in the computer-aided models created to assist with decision making and planning. From DSS, data warehouses, Executive Information Systems, OLAP and business intelligence came into focus beginning in the late 80s.

In 1989 Howard Dresner (later a Gartner Group analyst) proposed "business intelligence" as an umbrella term to describe "concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems." It was not until the late 1990s that this usage was widespread.

  

Business intelligence and data warehousing

Often BI applications use data gathered from a data warehouse or a data mart. However, not all data warehouses are used for business intelligence, nor do all business intelligence applications require a data warehouse.

In order to distinguish between concepts of business intelligence and data warehouses, Forrester Research often defines business intelligence in one of two ways:

Using a broad definition: "Business Intelligence is a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information used to enable more effective strategic, tactical, and operational insights and decision-making." When using this definition, business intelligence also includes technologies such as data integration, data quality, data warehousing, master data management, text and content analytics, and many others that the market sometimes lumps into the Information Management segment. Therefore, Forrester refers to data preparation and data usage as two separate, but closely linked segments of the business intelligence architectural stack.

Forrester defines the latter, narrower business intelligence market as "referring to just the top layers of the BI architectural stack such as reporting, analytics and dashboards."

Future

A 2009 Gartner paper predicted these developments in the business intelligence market:

• Because of lack of information, processes, and tools, through 2012, more than 35 percent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets.
• By 2012, business units will control at least 40 percent of the total budget for business intelligence.
• By 2012, one-third of analytic applications applied to business processes will be delivered through coarse-grained application mashups.

A 2009 Information Management special report predicted the top BI trends: "green computing, social networking, data visualization, mobile BI, predictive analytics, composite applications, cloud computing and multitouch."

Other business intelligence trends include the following:

• Third party SOA-BI products increasingly address ETL issues of volume and throughput.
• Cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) are ubiquitous.
• Companies embrace in-memory processing, 64-bit processing, and pre-packaged analytic BI applications.
• Operational applications have callable BI components, with improvements in response time, scaling, and concurrency.
• Near or real time BI analytics is a baseline expectation.
• Open source BI software replaces vendor offerings.

Other lines of research include the combined study of business intelligence and uncertain data . In this context, the data used is not assumed to be precise, accurate and complete. Instead, data is considered uncertain and therefore this uncertainty is propagated to the results produced by BI.

According to a study by the Aberdeen Group, there has been increasing interest in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business intelligence over the past years, with twice as many organizations using this deployment approach as one year ago – 15% in 2009 compared to 7% in 2008.

An article by InfoWorld’s Chris Kanaracus points out similar growth data from research firm IDC, which predicts the SaaS BI market will grow 22 percent each year through 2013 thanks to increased product sophistication, strained IT budgets, and other factors.

Massive EarthQuake Hits NE,India

The earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter Scale,  which hit the east and north east (NE) region, was the biggest in 20 years, officials said.

Records of Central Seismological Observatory here showed increasing seismic activity in the region.

The epicentre of the earthquake lay in the Sikkim-Nepal border region. But it was felt widely, all the way from New Delhi to Mizoram.

However, there were some reports of minor damage in concrete houses in the region.

The Geological Survey of India had earlier notified that mountainous northeastern region could experience a devastating earthquake as the region, according to seismologists, falls in zone V, the sixth worst quake-prone belt in the world.

Initial analyses suggest the earthquake was complex, likely a result of two events occurring close together in time at depths of approximately 20 km beneath the Earth’s surface. At the latitude of the September 18 earthquake, the India plate converges with Eurasia at a rate of approximately 46 mm/yr towards the north-northeast. The broad convergence between these two plates has resulted in the uplift of the Himalayas, the world’s tallest mountain range. The preliminary focal mechanism of the earthquake

suggests strike slip faulting, and thus an intraplate source within the upper Eurasian plate or the underlying India plate, rather than occurring on the thrust interface plate boundary between the two.
This region has experienced relatively moderate seismicity in the past, with 18 earthquakes of M 5 or greater over the past 35 years within 100 km of the epicenter of the September 18 event. The largest of these was a M 6.1 earthquake in November of 1980, 75 km to the southeast.

UFO sighted in Manipur

IMPHAL, June 19 Believe it or not, mystery shrouded Ngankha Lawai village in Manipurs Bishnupur district, 35 kms south of here after a young farmer fainted and was hospitalised following an encounter with an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO).

The mysterious incident occurred when the 31 year-old farmer Koiremba Kumam was taking video of a fish farm near his house using his mobile phone on June 15 around 3.11 pm.

Suddenly, I captured mashak khangdaba potsak ama (UFO) in the sky, the farmer said. I fainted for a few seconds after a small round black object sped towards me.

Showing the video image of the UFO captured in his mobile phone, Koiremba claimed he felt an electric shock when it came come towards him. He returned home after few moments of unconsciousness.

The family took him to the nearby district hospital due to deterioration of his health and later referred to RIMS hospital in Imphal the following day. But he was discharged from the hospital the same evening after giving treatment as there was no symptom of any illness. However, Koiremba said he has not fully recovered.

A similar mystery shrouded Monsangei maning leikai village under Imphal West district in early part of last year when the villagers saw a bluish icy mass, weighing around five kilograms which fell on the tin-roofed kitchen of one Sougrakpam Jugeshwar of the locality with a sudden bang from the sky.

Lok Sabha MP Dr Thokchom Meinya, who is also an astronomer, reacting to the descriptions given by the onlookers, had opined that the mass might have been accidentally ejected from the support system of a rocket or a space craft.

(source NE Blogger on June 20, 2011)