Business Intelligence: basics you need to know

The concept of business intelligence derives from Howard Dresner (Gartner Group, 1989), who defined it as a set of techniques and tools for the acquisition and transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes.

On Wikipedia we find the following definition:

The key general categories of business intelligence tools are:

However, we do not necessarily need a data warehouse in order to build up a business intelligence system, yet those questions that come up in the course of planning a data warehouse can highlight the fact that business intelligence does not stop with the collection of data or the application of different software applications, but it means a full organisational transformation and new thinking method and outlook of managers.

It includes the whole screening of the company’s functioning, re-planning of internal processes and accurate identification of business purposes.

In the course of planning a data warehouse you have to take into consideration the following questions that may rise (Krajcsak 2012):

Information as a corporate resource has economic value, mainly in terms of competitive advantage. It is particularly important for collected and stored pieces of information to be high-quality, otherwise we will be doing only database-building that is impossible to use for analysis and research.