Chapter 4 - The Business Intelligence Environment

Abstract

The chapter aims to provide the manager with a working vocabulary based on a high-level view of the business intelligence (BI) environment. Business intelligence (BI) process revolves around the ability to flow large amounts of disparate data into a single repository and then, in turn, to flow restructured data for decision-support purposes out to data marts and related analytic process. An understanding of the high-level building blocks that make up a program is required to effectively plan the implementation of the BI program. The chapter discusses the highest-level abstraction of what needs to go into a BI program and discusses how to inspire the team leaders to identify knowledge gaps before actually implementing the system. The process of creating actionable knowledge is based on more than just sloshing data among different points in an organization. The keystone of a BI program is the centralized enterprise data repository. Data warehousing and its uses are described in the chapter. A data warehouse is a centralized, nonvolatile repository of enterprise information, gathered and integrated from multiple sources, and placed in a data model that is suitable for the analytical process.