Business Intelligence, Decision Support Systems, Informational Environments are some terms to name the efforts to convert all transactional data generated by daily activities of some organization into valuable and timely information to make accurate decisions, to measure the performance of this organization in known indicators inside this organization or to benchmark this company against competitors with this indicators.
Everyone is involved...
This definition is very high-level one. The experience through many Business Intelligence projects indicates that the process involves every single part of the company to be analyzed, it means: data producers (every involved data-cruncher system and user), data analyzers, information consumers, decision-influencers, decision-makers and IT multi-disciplined teams to achieve the ultimate goal: give to all the appropriate tools to make the most successful decisions.
An important consideration is all technology involved: all data sources (data-origin information systems) to be exploited, how all this data must be extracted, how all this data must be converted, summarized and shown to final applications (and users), how often this data must be recovered from its origins, and so on. This is only a partial description of the “logical” of “intangible” side of efforts to build a Business Intelligence platform.
The “tangible” side of a BI platform is all necessary resources to allocate all retrieved data, like disk space and administration; all processing resources to manipulate all retrieved data and all network resources to transport all necessary data and to show all obtained information. Also, it is necessary to administer all these resources, secure and maintain these resources and document the obtained platform in order to provide the best information and decision services.
Then, this page briefly summarizes what Business Intelligence is and the intention of this site: allow to the writer share all his experience, acquired during the implementation of several Business Intelligence Implementations for diverse organizations and users.