Introduction

Business Intelligence (BI) is the process of converting raw material into meaningful information. A set of process, architecture that drives profitable business actions.

BI is the method of collecting, storing and analyzing data from business operations or activities to optimize performance.

It has a direct impact on the organizational strategic and operational business decision. It impacts the revenue and financial model of the business.

What is Data warehouse?

Data warehouse consist of huge storage of data gathered from single or many sources to aid the process of making an informed decision at any level of an enterprise. A typical data warehouse follows an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process.

The ETL is the process where we Extract, Transform and Load the data from one source to the destination system.

Extract : The first step in using data warehouse is to extract data from single or multiple sources to load in it’s environment.

Transform : The data which has been extracted, may not come in the desired format or size etc, so there may be the need to transform the incoming data to meet the business requirements and objects.

Load : Once the data is being transformed, its already to be loaded in targeted tables.

A business intelligence tool takes data from a data warehouse to generate the reports and help the end user to make informed decision. By this, we can call data warehouse as a prat of complete business intelligence (BI) process.

Business Intelligence current scenario

• Microsoft excel is most widely used tool for data analysis.
• Repetitive and time consuming tasks.
• Delay in process information.
• High dependence on IT for data extraction.
• Sharing information by email.
• Hard to achieve the right numbers.

Modern Business Intelligence platforms

• Business areas are asking to become independent from IT for creating reports, in order to gain agility and autonomy.
• The emergence of Modern BI platforms or Self-Service BI tools are helping.
• Today the role of IT in BI projects should move towards a strategic partner instead of a producer.

Traditional BI architecture

The below visual is a traditional BI architecture diagram which explains how BI workflow was used to be carried on in the traditional way.

The first step of the architecture is to collect the data from different domain such as customer, sales, production, financial, etc. Once the data is been collected then ETL process is done of the collected data. After the ETL process is performed the data goes to next step where it is been stored into the Data warehouse. When data is stored properly then data model is created on basis of data which is stored in data warehouse. By taking data model into consideration, reports are been created and further shared to various stakeholders. So this is the traditional way of using Business Intelligence.

Conclusion

So as we saw the traditional BI systems has a long workflow and it is time consuming. But modern BI systems are very easy to use with less time consuming and with many features as compared to that of the traditional systems.

As of now we have read about the traditional BI process in the further blog we are going to discuss on Advanced BI techniques and architecture using various tools for data analytics.

Happy Learning! Stay tuned!