Purchasing a Business Intelligence System

Purchasing a Business Intelligence System

Introduction

The success of a company in the highly competitive environment of today depends on many factors such as choice of customers, choice of products and services, choice of the most effective sales channels for specific products, finding ways to boost the results of marketing campaigns, improving customer loyalty, retaining satisfied customers and improving the overall quality of customer’s experience (Fleisher and Blenkhorn, 2003). Business intelligence systems can provide keys to decision making in these crucial areas. BI systems can help track the pulse of vital performance factors. BI needs to provide information on demand and this is achieved by combining multidimensional data analysis and data mining techniques with advanced statistical and analytical functions in a real-time, integrated environment (Fleisher and Blenkhorn, 2003). Data collection methods, multimedia files and rapid-access tools that grow and adjust as needed are parts of this dynamic system which needs to be tuned and monitored with constant vigilance in order to have a sharp focus on overall enterprise effectiveness.

How will business intelligence software help our business

Implementation of Business intelligence systems in a company provides specific and timely knowledge regarding customers, products and markets and this knowledge will help to increase profits, decrease costs and will support a more efficient management. The knowledge that is acquired through Business Intelligence systems is based on comprehensive, detailed and relevant information and hence they take decision makers to a higher level by providing them with a thorough understanding of a company’s operations. Business intelligence systems are capable of leveraging a company’s assets to optimize their value and provide a good return on investment. Some of the underlying concepts of business intelligence are data warehousing, data mining, the Internet, and the World Wide Web. The advent of the internet has revolutionized the ability of decision makers to find, accumulate, organize, and access business intelligence. The bottom line is that effective BISs give decision makers the ability to keep track of the changes in the business environment every step of the way.

What sort of information and analysis capabilities does it provide?

Business intelligence (BI) tools provide organizations with information regarding their internal and external environment through collection, analysis and interpretation of information. There are two sets of BI tools: one set helps to manipulate massive operational data and these include the decision support systems, executive information systems, online-analytical processing (OLAP), data warehouses and data mining systems while the other set, commonly known as competitive intelligence tools serve to collect and analyze information from the competitive environment to assist organizational decision making (Chung et al., 2002). The first set of BI tools is based on database management systems and is used to reveal trends and patterns in the operational databases while the second set is based on information collected from public sources such as the Web. BI tools provide different views of collected information and some advanced tools use text-mining and rule-based techniques to process collected information. Generally, BI tools integrate their reports with Microsoft Office products and present them in textual format. In the case of document visualization, business intelligence systems work through three stages: analysis, algorithms, and visualization. In the analysis stage, the user inputs his interests in the form of keywords which are then used to extract the essential features of a collection of text are extracted. In the algorithms stage, “an efficient and flexible structure of the document set is created by clustering and projecting the high-dimensional structure into a two or three-dimensional space” (Chung et al, 2002, 2). In the visualization stage, the data is presented to users and made sensitive to interaction (Chung et al, 2002). The information provided by BIS helps in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the companies.

What hardware and system software are required to run the application?

For business intelligence systems to be successful, there is a need to create an appropriate infrastructure to capture and create data, information, and knowledge, and store them, improve them, clarify them, and disseminate them to decision makers so that there can be a fuller understanding of a company’s operations for actionable results. This needs computers and data storing devices and reporting and printing tools on the hardware side. On the software side, BI systems make use of data m