Subject: Data Mining And Business Intelligence

Topic: Business Intelligence

Difficulty: Low

Business intelligence (BI) : -

Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven process for analyzing data and delivering actionable information that helps executives, managers and workers make informed business decisions. As part of the BI process, organizations collect data from internal IT systems and external sources, prepare it for analysis, run queries against the data and create data visualizations, BI dashboards and reports to make the analytics results available to business users for operational decision-making and strategic planning.

The ultimate goal of BI initiatives is to drive better business decisions that enable organizations to increase revenue, improve operational efficiency and gain competitive advantages over business rivals. To achieve that goal, BI incorporates a combination of analytics, data management and reporting tools, plus various methodologies for managing and analyzing data.

Common business intelligence functions include:

• Data mining: sorting through large datasets using databases, statistics, and machine learning to identify trends and establish relationships

• Querying: a request for specific data or information from a database

• Data preparation: the process of combining and structuring data in order to prepare it for analysis

• Reporting: sharing operating and financial data analysis with decision-makers so they can draw conclusions and make decisions

• Benchmarking: comparing current business processes and performance metrics to historical data to track performance against industry bests

• Descriptive analytics: the interpretation of historical data to draw comparisons and better understand changes that have occurred in a business

• Statistical analysis: collecting the results from descriptive analytics and applying statistics in order to identify trends

• Data visualization: provides visual representations such as charts and graphs for easy data analysis