BI & Data Analytics Consulting

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence (BI) is an umbrella term for a set of processes, applications, and technologies that focus on analytical data processing, which includes data gathering/ingestion, data storage, data analysis, reporting, and other tasks. In other words, it is the set of techniques and tools for the transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes and decision making.

Business intelligence is designed to answer

BI aims to improve organizations by providing business insights to all employees leading to better, faster, more relevant decisions.

The stages of Business Intelligence

1. The Data

Defining which data will be loaded into the system and analyzed.

All the information is stored here
Often an OLAP type data source
- Used for reporting
- May form base of data warehouse or BI tools

2. The ETL (extract, transform, load) Engine

Moving the source data to the data warehouse.

This can be a complex step involving modification and calculations on the data itself
If this step doesn’t work properly, the BI solution cannot be effective

3. Data Warehousing

The process of constructing and using data warehouses

A data warehouse is an analytically oriented, integrated, time-variant, and nonvolatile collection of data that supports decision-making processes.
Large databases that aggregate data collected from multiple sources

4. Analytic Engine

Analyzes multidimensional data sets found in a data warehouse to identify trends, outliers, and patterns.

Data mining is the process of extracting patterns from data and is commonly used in a wide range of profiling practices, such as marketing, surveillance, fraud detection, and scientific discovery.

5. Presentation Layer

The dashboards, reports, and alerts that present findings from the analysis.

Typically technology agnostic
Represents all the information

BI is used for making decisions at all levels of an organization. Strategic, tactical, operational. BI/Analytics can be applied in all business entities (industries, functional areas, or domains) to drive business performance. Including:

Companies (for profit)
- Retail, manufacturing, real estate, financial, sports, media, advertising, entertainment, healthcare, publication, energy, etc.
Non-profit organizations, institutions, associations, communities, etc.
Government
- Citizen service, city planning, crime, immigration, etc.
Individuals
- Personal health, exercise, learning, eating, power consumption, etc.

Utilize Data for Better Decision Making

Onset Technologies provides a range of project management, planning, and consulting services for businesses. As a business intelligence and data analytics consulting company, Onset Technologies helps clients leverage existing data and collect new data to become proactive, predictive, agile, and more competitive. If your business wants to gain productivity and competitive advantage using business intelligence and data analytics, contact us today and speak with one of our IT professionals.