What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence provides the means for an organisation to make informed and timely decisions at all levels within an organisation.

An effective business intelligence solution consists of a complete business intelligence infrastructure as outlined in the diagram below, supported by appropriate processes and management.

A business intelligence solution uses a data warehouse environment to store relevant data and deliver appropriate information in a relevant way to people throughout an organisation.

The data warehouse infrastructure employs a separate hardware platform from an organisation's operational systems. This means that the (typically resource intensive) information requests do not slow down and overload operational systems. It also means that data from all or most operational systems are combined onto one system, which allows information to be combined from many systems.

• Extract, transform, load (ETL)

  The ETL component of a data warehouse is responsible for extracting data from the required operational systems, transforming (and cleaning) the data into a consistent format for the data warehouse and loading it into the data warehouse in a timely and effective manner.

• Data warehouse storage

  Vast amounts of data are typically required in a data warehouse. Appropriate design is required to ensure data is stored efficiently, but more importantly that data is stored in a form ready to meet the information needs of users.

• Information delivery

  The most important part of the solution is to be able to supply the information that people need in the most effective way for that person.

  It is important to note that a business intelligence or data warehouse solution is a journey, nor a destination. It is not a typical IT project that is designed, implemented and completed, and then rolled over into maintenance mode. A successful business intelligence solution is under constant development, to meet the changing and ongoing information needs of an organisation.