Chapter 13 - Business Intelligence Applications

Abstract

Develop business intelligence (BI) content specifications in order to design and document the BI applications that will be built. Review the BI content specifications to create a revised and agreed-upon list of BI application deliverables. To help ensure the application is built to meet the needs of its intended audience, use the concept of personas. For BI, these are casual consumers, analysts, power users, and data scientists. Effective BI applications are focused on their purpose (helping business people glean knowledge from data), and they are created with best practices for layout and design that make them intuitive. And while cluttered and poorly designed visual layouts can hinder business analysis, it also affects data layouts, particularly with self-service BI. It is important to match the type of analysis someone needs to do with the appropriate visualization, so understand when to use bar charts, scattergrams, maps, etc.