BI Trends
The blending of software and consulting services: This trend means that vendors are beginning to offer this, as opposed to selling the software and infrastructure businesses need to access intelligence on their own.
What trend offers "information as a service" and present intelligence to clients?
These systems are typically the primary data source for BI. Examples include CRM systems, ERP systems, inventory databases, HR and payroll systems, and many others.
What is transactional?
This is an example of unstructured data.
What is social media comments about the company, audio recordings of calls with customer service agents, website search indexes, videos, images, and data from various types of sensors?
A VP of Sales at a retail company like PetSmart may use BI visualization tools to gain this understanding of their business.
Example: compare regional performance of fish sales
In the first stages of business intelligence, IT teams ran reports and queries for the business side. Today's systems are focused more on enabling this type of intelligence for business users.
What is self-service?
This is the process of getting ready for analysis and ends with the data warehouse.
What is Extract, Transform, Load (ETL)?
This is the guide's definition of Big Data.
What is "any data that can't be managed using conventional database tools, but can still be analyzed to create valuable insight for the organization"?
A COO at a manufacturing company may want to view this with his BI tool.
Example: inventory of raw materials
This BI trend allows businesses to use intelligence without dedicating internal resources to manage infrastructure and perform software upgrades.
What is cloud-based BI?
ETL and data warehousing represent the back-end of BI, while this process represents the front end.
What is OLAP (Online Analytical Processing)?
Big Data can help companies know more about their customers and industry. This is a real life Big Data company use case mentioned in the guide.
What is hotel chain (weather data and flight cancellations), pizza chain (weather and power outages), and university health system (population growth and chronic disease diagnoses)?
A CEO at a financial services company may want to view this with BI.
Example: risk assessment of various investment types
This trend allows decision makers to access intelligence wherever they need it, not just when they’re at their desks.
What is mobile BI?
These tools present data using charts, graphs, and other formats to aid understanding.
What are visualizations?
Big Data and BI have the same purpose and goal: to use available data in order to learn more about a business, its markets and its customers in order to make better decisions. This is a difference between Big Data and BI.
What is BI analyzes structured data, Big Data analyzes unstructured data. BI finds answers to the questions you know. Big Data finds questions you don't know you want to ask. The tools and infrastructure are different?
A CEO at a healthcare company, such as a hospital, may want to gain this insight through Big Data.
Example: patient satisfaction
Business intelligence is increasingly being combined with this type of analytics, so businesses can make decisions using all the information they have at their disposal, regardless of what form it takes (all raw data).
What is Big Data?
This is the primary graphical interface used when working with a BI system.
What are dashboards?
Data warehouses are being used to store both of these types of data.
What is structured and unstructured data?
An oil & gas company may want to view this type of unstructured data with Big Data software.
Example: seismic data