What is Business Intelligence?

In the simplest terms Business Intelligence is reporting.  Within any business people rely on information systems to record the workings of the business.  Information about our customers, our vendors, and our interactions with them, or transactions is all captured with these wonderful machines we call computers.  

So we are pouring all of this information into these machines, capturing every move we make, and now it is time to get the information back out.  The problem is we don’t want the information to come out the way we put it in.  What we want is a chart or a graph, or a simple table that tells us what’s going on, where our successes are and where things need to improve.   This is business intelligence.  Extracting from the mountains of information we have captured, the essence of what’s occurring to report status and allow us to make decisions about the future of our business.

If that were the whole picture then there would not be much to talk about.  As it turns out, we want access to this information differently depending on the situation.  Some situations require a printed report, others call for a highly summarized view that guides us to more detail to isolate issues.  Others still require an extremely flexible interaction that facilitates what-if analysis and allows us to manipulate information in any manner we see fit. 

In summary, Business Intelligence is the methodologies and technologies of providing businesses information from all of the data they have collected.  In the next, entry I will cover a number of typical business problems and discuss how they are approached with Business Intelligence technologies.

What’s coming Up:

•              What is the problem we are trying to solve
•               Why  you can’t have that report right now
•                Introducing the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition Platform

My First Blog Entry

I have spent the last year trying to figure out to start this blog.  Yesterday a friend gave me some direction: Just Start, make it short and sweet, and update it often.

What I hope to accomplish:   

My primary goal is to start a dialogue about Business Intelligence, specifically Oracle Business Intelligence, where I chronicle my experiences and musings. 

In addition, I want to use this blog to “de-geek” a little.  I spend a good portion of my time in the bits and bytes and I would like to expand my horizons by doing the least geeky thing possible, ahem...write a blog. Not a blog about poetry but BI no less.  I can already see this might be a fruitless effort, but who knows, maybe I will start blogging about BI in iambic pentameter.   

Finally, I hope to learn from others through the comments of my sole remaining reader.

What type of blog is this?  

Well it will be about Oracle BI basically.  In my adventures with my various customers I have come to the conclusion that many do not really understand the big picture.  This is obviously the fault of consultants like me, software vendors and some IT Professionals.  We just simply do not speak the same language as the business community we serve. 

The first series of entries will address; What is BI, Why is BI important and Why should business users trust us.

What’s coming Up:

·       

•     What is Business Intelligence
•     What is the problem we are trying to solve
•          Why you can’t have that report right now

I invite any comments from anyone on the direction of this series of posts…