Introduction to BI and OLAP

What is Business Intelligence?

BI stands for Business Intelligence, there can be many definitions to describe what is BI?

Business users don’t know:  what is data, where is data, how it comes and where it goes, what they understand is reading REPORTS that make sense for Business.

So, BI can be defined as a Decision support system (DSS) which helps in collating data, processing it and making available in sensible report format that Business users can read, understand and take proper decision based on inputs from REPORTS.

BI is and fancy term used now, it existed in 70’s,80’s and 90’s and people use to call it Manager Information System(MIS) and Executive Information System (EIS).

In Most systems today, data is present but in a unstructured way, difficult to comprehend or make sense out of it and how BI helps is to structure the data into proper information which can be presented to different business users to run the business process, monitor the progress and status of various business processes, forecast things like growth rate, sales, consumption info based on past data, etc.

BI systems are Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) Databases which typically differs in many ways from normal Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems which are OLTP databases.

Major Difference between OLTP and OLAP

CATEGORY	OLTP	OLAP
DATA SOURCE	Normal input or Transactional Data	Data for OLAP comes from OLTP database.
DATA CONTENT	Live Database system with latest updates.	Multi-Dimensional Views of PAST data.
PROCESSING SPEED	Fast processing.	Slow processing due to complex aggregation increases computational time
DATA RETRIVAL	Data can be retrieved by simple select queries.	Complex Multidimensional expression (MDX)
DATABASE DESIGN	Database is normalised to avoid redundancy.	Focus is on performance hence denormalised data.

Characteristic of BI application characteristic *1

1.       It should provide summary reports of critical operational data of the business process.

2.       Should provide selected details of critical operation

3.       Should have “DRILL DOWN” i.e. it should have flexible, intuitive navigation between various reporting points.

4.       Should have high quality ‘VISUAL’ presentation so that it can be easily understood by business user i.e. use of Graphics, Icons, Colour coding and hotspots.

5.       Minimal use of Keyboard, the executives should be able to make out sense from the reports, charts, graphs, etc.

6.       It should have external data sources.

Key Issues in BI system Development *2

1.       Sponsor may lose interest in due to dissatisfaction in product development.

2.       Unclear Role of IT.

3.       Complex system Architecture , designing of Multi-Dimensional view of data(OLAP)

4.       Requirement Elicitation

a.       Comprehending Unstructured information

b.      Issues faced by developer like finding time to work with executives ,changing and unsupportable requirement.

REFERENCE:

*1 Reference: Slide 31/32 of FIT5093 week 1.

*2 Reference: Slide 34/35 of FIT5093 week 1.