Supporting a Business Process Slide 11

Business Intelligence Business Requirements The main purpose of Business Intelligence in a business is to help corporate executives, business managers and other operational workers make better and more ________________________ . Companies also use BI to cut costs, identify new business opportunities, and spot inefficient business processes ripe for re- engineering.

How does BI supports the business process? Accelerating and improving decision making Optimizing internal business processes Increasing operational efficiency Driving ________________ Gaining competitive advantages over business rivals. Identifying market trends Spotting business problems that need to be addressed

What to look for in a BI Tools / Programs Business intelligence tools are essentially data-driven Decision Support Systems (DSS). BI is sometimes used interchangeably with briefing books, report and query tools and executive information systems. With these tools, business _______________________ the data themselves, rather than wait for IT to run complex reports. This information access helps users back up business decisions with hard numbers, rather than only gut feelings and anecdotes.

Business Intelligence software systems can provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations, most often using data that has been gathered into a data warehouse or a data mart and occasionally working from operational data. Software elements support reporting, interactive “slice-and-dice” pivot-table analyses, visualization, and statistical data mining. Applications _________________, production, financial, and many other sources of business data for purposes that include business performance management.

End Users Requirements in BI  The business intelligence end-user can be defined as a decision- maker (of any level within the company), who does not necessarily possess IT skills and who uses business data and information from the BI solution to guide his actions. The success that a BI solution will have in propelling the organization forward depends in large part on how it is ___________________. Adoption makes or breaks a BI project. And adoption is, in turn, dependent on three factors: ease of use, usefulness and cost.

Ease of Use: The First Requirement of BI End-user Adoption The goal is to help end-users solve problems, eliminate inefficiency and achieve the company’s strategic goals. New technologies tend to make some new _____________, especially if they are perceived as coming with a steep learning curve. If a newly-implemented BI solution is (or even comes across as) complex to learn and use, you can rest assured that many end-users will be reluctant to adopt it, and will instead fall back on what’s familiar.

Especially with Web-based solutions, user interfaces should mirror the easy and intuitive navigability of the Internet. Important information and _____________ should pop out to the end-user without requiring him to sift through pages of data or reconciling multiple tools. Likewise, analysis should be intuitive, letting the user filter, sort, drill down and drill through data at the click of a mouse without any technical knowledge required.

Usefulness: BI Must Solve Real Problems Even if initially adopted, a BI solution will quickly lose its following within the organization if it does not provide real solutions for the end-users. “Does this make my job easier and does it make me successful at what I do?” is the question that needs to be answered in the affirmative through the business intelligence solution. And how does a BI solution make personnel ________________ and more successful? By making it easier for them to spot, understand and act upon critical situation while making as many routine tasks as possible automatic.

Cost: Avoid User Fees The more expensive a good, the less of this good will be bought, goes a fundamental law of economics. Likewise, BI user fees–a throwback of the time when BI solutions were all desktop–discourage widespread end-user adoption. Yet, most BI vendors still charge by the user, forcing companies to either be conservative in estimating who gets access to BI or to waste license fees on employees who end up not using the solution. The best licensing model is server-based, which allows companies to empower as many end-users as they need at no additional cost.

System Requirements All BI software has different system requirements for installing and running it. An example of hardware and software requirements for installing Power BI Report Server are:-

Practical Exercise Install Microsoft Business Intelligence. Design a BI application or interface that can help a manager to perform any task that for his business. (e.g Performance Management etc)