Businesses, more than ever before, are relying on fact based decision-making and analytics to compete in this environment. This has given rise to "Business Intelligence," or simply BI, a broad category of applications and technologies for accessing, combining, computing and analyzing data to help enterprise users make better business decisions.
Managing Business Intelligence (BI) Complexity
By Dhananjay Joshi, Product Line Manager, Exact Business Analytics Executive Summary The business environment today is becoming ever more complex. Businesses, more than ever before, are relying on fact based decision-making and analytics to compete in this environment. This has given rise to "Business Intelligence," or simply BI, a broad category of applications and technologies for accessing, combining, computing and analyzing data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. According to research by KRC Research, on behalf of Unisys Corporation, BI has become a significant part of the information technology (IT) strategy of all organizations. The survey respondents attributed the trend due to the following: managing corporate performance (29 percent of respondents), monitoring business activity (27 percent of respondents) and reporting or regulatory compliance (22 percent of respondents). BI has been positioned as a panacea for the information retrieval challenges and is supposed to simplify the information maze. As companies started implementing BI projects, it became apparent that BI applications had their own framework that posed challenges in their unification with the existing technology and resources. The introduction of 'new parts' like data warehouses, reconciliation, application servers, additional skill-sets, and increased maintenance led to even greater complexity. Introduction In A. J. Deutsch's short story A Subway Named Mobius, Boston's Public Transportation Authority introduces a new line and the topology of the network becomes so complex that a train vanishes-lost in some fourth dimensional properties of the network. The mathematics in this story may not always be accurate, but many managers today can identify with the situation. They work with systems that are increasingly complex-where it may seem almost impossible to understand all the interconnections. Many fear they may lose track of some important detail that could cause their train to jump the track. Enter Business Intelligence Business Intelligence is supposed to address data and information complexity in the modern business environment to help minimize the decision-making complexity. BI should: . Supply accurate data in a timely manner in a secure environment . Present data in the form of easily digestible information . Provide easy means to answer ensuing questions . Allow effective communication BI should simplify gathering and presenting information, so that less technical knowledge is needed and communication between the members of the organization is improved. Information should be surfaced in common business language rather than cryptic database languages thus keeping information retrieval and consumption simple for all. Simple framework of BI means lesser introduction of 'newer parts,' and easier administration and maintenance. This also means more time and energy can be spent on analyzing the information than trying to gather, store and reconcile. Real World Challenges Complexity challenges BI in various ways. Some companies, especially the larger ones, experience multiples of these complexity challenges. As organizations grow, they may end up with one or more transaction systems for a variety of reasons: mergers and acquisitions, additional applications due to growing needs, different software vendors, legacy databases, etc. The first challenge is to access and combine data from these multiple databases in an efficient and timely manner. Redundant databases like the data warehouse or data marts impose additional 'feeding and seeding' requirements that can be a big drain on the resources. These databases may be centralized or dispersed. Consolidation often poses a performance challenge. It is imperative to execute 'queries' with minimal impact on system performance and with minimal hardware investment. The consolidation has to make use of every resource available-hardware and network. Businesses often times need on-demand business analytics-on-hand inventory from multiple locations, open orders or upcoming shipments to ship from various locations, etc. As businesses need to react more quickly to market demands, putting this capability in the hands of users gives a big competitive edge. This also means that BI should allow real-time analysis with simplicity and minimal impact of the system performance. Multiple databases and transaction systems ... [download for more]
