Essential aspects of business intelligence

Currently the elements that offer a differentiation in organizations are increasingly scarce and with great ease to be adapted by the competition. Aspects such as location, innovation processes in products and services have gradually ceased to be differentiators, leaving companies with an increasingly narrow margin of action and where efficiency and effectiveness for decision-making becomes highly relevant, being It is vitally important to take advantage of all the data and information that the organization has to convert it into knowledge that can be used within the greatest number of processes within the organization supporting decision-making.

So an organization that decides to implement a business intelligence strategy must decide what business capabilities it will optimize. Extensively applying data, statistical analysis, mathematical models, analysis methodologies that support the selected capabilities. Which obeys the definition of business intelligence that Davenport and Harris offer us; "It is a set of technologies and procedures that use the data to know, understand and analyze the performance of the company's activity." (Davenport & Harris, 2009).

Among the main benefits that business intelligence offers organizations is:

• Improve operational efficiency

• Promote pro-activity of staff

• Provide better customer service

• Identify problems ahead of time

• Increases business transparency

• Save on costs

(Eckerson, 2007)

Being its main utility the facility for strategic decision making (Cano, 2007)

Among the components that make up business intelligence are:

1. Sources of information to feed the Datawarehouse.

2. ETL process of extraction, transformation and loading of the data in the datawarehouse, before storing the data.

3. Datawarehouse or data warehouse with metadata or data dictionary. It provides flexibility and ease of access and administration.

4. OLAP engine that offers us the capacity of calculation, queries, planning functions, forecasts and scenario analysis in large volumes of data.

The main tools of Business Intelligence (Cano, 2007):

1. Report Generators.- Used by professional developers to create standard reports for groups, departments and the organization.

2. End user tools for queries and reports.- used by end users to create reports for themselves or for others, does not require programming.

3. OLAP tools.- They allow end users to treat information in a multidimensional way to explore it from different perspectives and time periods.

4. Dashboard and Scorecard tools.- They allow end users to see critical information for performance at a glance using graphic icons and with the possibility of seeing more detail to analyze detailed information and reports, if they wish.

5. Planning, modeling and consolidation tools: Allows analysts and end users to create business plans and simulations with Business Intelligence information. They can be to elaborate the planning, the budgets, the forecasts. These tools provide dashboards and scorecards with goals and metric thresholds.

6. Datamining tools: They allow statisticians or business analysts to create statistical models of business activities. Datamining is the process of discovering and interpreting unknown patterns in information through which to solve business problems. The most common uses of datamining are: segmentation, cross-selling, consumption paths, classification, forecasts, optimizations, etc.

The following image shows what a user screen looks like in a market intelligence tool.