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Business Intelligence – Reporting and Analysis

  • Operational Reporting is the application of BI tools to analyze business trends, both short-term (month-over-month) and longer-term (year-over-year). Operational reporting can also help discover trends and patterns. Tactical BI Tool should be used to support short-term business decisions. Operational Reporting involves business users generating reports directly from transactional systems, operational applications, or a data warehouse. This is typically an application functionality.
    • Often the reports created by business users become standard reports, not exclusively used for ad hoc business questions.
    • Often business areas will start to use a DW for operational reporting, especially if DW/BI governance is poor, or the DW contains additional data that enhances the operational, transaction data.
    • Often the reports will appear as ad-hoc queries, when in fact they are simple reports or are used to initiate workflow.
    • While IT develops production reports, power users and adhoc business users develop their own reports with business query tools.
    • Use reports generated with business query tools individually, departmentally, or enterprise-wide.
  • Business Performance Management (BPM) Broadly speaking, Performance Management technology enables processes to help meet organizational goals. Measurement and a feedback loop with positive reinforcement are key elements. It includes the formal assessment of metrics aligned with organizational goals. This assessment usually happens at the executive level. Use Strategic BI to support long-term corporate goals and objectives. Performance management is a set of integrated organizational processes and applications designed to optimize execution of business strategy; applications include budgeting, planning, and financial consolidation. There have been a number of major acquisitions in this segment, as ERP vendors and BI vendors see great growth opportunities here and believe BI and Performance Management are converging. Another specialization has formed in this area: creating scorecards driven by dashboards for user interaction. Dashboards, like those found in automobiles, provide the necessary summary or aggregate information to the end user with most recent updates.
  • Descriptive, Self-Service Analytics provides BI to the front lines of the business, where analytical capabilities guide Operational Decisions. Operational Analytics couples BI applications with operational functions and processes, to guide decisions in near real-time. The requirement for low latency (near real-time data capture and data delivery) will drive the architectural approach to operational analytics solutions. Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) and Big Data become necessary to support operational analytics fully

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