What is Business Intelligence?
The purpose of Business Intelligence is the transformation of raw data into meaningful information which can be used to make better business decisions.
Business Intelligence grew out of Decision Support systems and is all about collecting data from disparate sources, conforming and integrating that data into central repositories which support reporting and analysis activities.
The reporting and analysis can take the form of anything from scheduled reports pushed to managed groups, to ad hoc end user development of reports, dashboards, and visualizations.
Utilizing Business Intelligence tools and techniques end users can be given an environment where data is presented with common business names, relationships between data elements is predefined, data is pre-aggregated along multiple dimensions and the data has been vetted against business rules.
This type of environment enables Self Service Business Intelligence where end users can simply drag and drop data elements from a common repository into reports, scorecards, and visualizations. Those reports and analysis can be shared throughout organizations, and outside the organization with customers, partners, etc.
The challenge in implementing a Business Intelligence solution is in pulling all of this data from disparate sources, cleansing the data, relating the data and processing the data into dimensions, facts, and pre-aggregated values. This is typically done through Extract Transform and Load (ETL) processes and tools, data warehouse/data mart repositories and multi-dimensional cubes.
That is where XTIVIA can help. We are experienced in developing ETL processes, defining data warehouses and data marts, creating reports and enterprise reporting solutions, and building dashboards and visualizations. We are technology and methodology agnostic, so we can use the tools and processes that best fit your organization’s needs.
Our experience in developing data warehouses/data marts, working with various proprietary and open source tools, partnerships with industry-leading vendors, and ability to work in multiple development methodologies makes us your vendor of choice for your next Business Intelligence initiative.