Chapter 9 Summary

Q1:  How Do Organizations Use Business Intelligence (BI) Systems?

Business Intelligence systems are information systems that process operational, social, and other data to identify patterns, relationships, and trends for use by business professionals and other knowledge workers.  These patterns, relationships, trends, and predictions are referred to as business intelligence.  As information systems, BI systems have the five standard components:  hardware, software, data, procedures, and people.  The software component of a BI system is called a BI application.  BI can be used just for informing, problem solving, or during project management.

Q2:  What Are the Three Primary Activities in the BI Process?

Data acquisition is the process of obtaining, cleaning, organizing, relating, and cataloging source data.  BI analysis is the process of creating business intelligence.  The four fundamental categories of BI analysis are reporting, data mining, BigData, and knowledge management.  Publish results is the process of delivering business intelligence to the knowledge workers who need it.  Push publishing delivers business intelligence to users without any request from the users; the BI results are delivered according to a schedule or as a result of an event or particular data condition.  Pull publishing requires the user to request BI results.

Q3:  How Do Organizations Use Data Warehouses and Data Marts to Acquire Data?

A data warehouse is a facility for managing an organization's BI data.  The functions of a data warehouse are to:  obtain data, cleanse data, organize and relate data, and catalog data.  The data warehouse takes data from the data manufacturers, cleans and processes the data, and locates the data on the shelves of the data warehouse.  The data analysts who work with a data warehouse are experts at data management, data cleaning, data transformation, data relationships, and the like.  A data mart is a data collection, smaller than the data warehouse, that addresses the needs of a particular department or functional area of the business.  Users in the data mart obtain data that pertain to a particular business function from the data warehouse.

Q4:  How Do Organizations Use Reporting Applications?

A reporting application is a BI application that inputs data from one or more sources and applies reporting operations to that data to produce business intelligence.  Reporting applications produce business intelligence using five basic operations:  sorting, filtering, grouping, calculating, and formatting.  RFM analysis, a technique readily implemented with basic reporting operations, is used to analyze and rank customers according to their purchasing patterns.  Online analytical processing (OLAP), a second type of reporting application, is more generic than RFM.  OLAP provides the ability to sum, count, average, and perform other simple arithmetic operations on groups of data.

Q5:  How Do Organizations Use Data Mining Applications?

Data mining is the application of statistical techniques to find patterns and relationships among data for classification and prediction.  Data mining techniques take advantage of developments in data management for processing the enormous databases that have emerged in the last 10 years.  With unsupervised data mining, analysts do not create a model or hypothesis before running the analysis.  One common unsupervised technique is cluster analysis.  With supervised data mining, data miners develop a model prior to the analysis and apply statistical techniques to data to estimate parameters of the model.  One such analysis is called regression analysis.

Q6:  How Do Organizations Use BigData Applications?

MapReduce is a technique for harnessing the power of thousands of computers working in parallel.  The basic idea is that the BigData collection is broken into pieces, and hundreds or thousands of independent processors search these pieces for something of interest.

Q7:  What Is the Role of Knowledge Management Systems?

Knowledge management (KM) is the process of creating value from intellectual capital and sharing that knowledge with employees, managers, suppliers, customers, and others that need that capital.  KM benefits organizations in two fundamental ways:  improve process quality and increase team strength.  Expert systems are rule-based systems that encode human knowledge in the form of If/Then rules.  The program that process a set of rules are called expert systems shells.

Q8:  What Are the Alternatives for Publishing BI?

Static reports are BI documents that are fixed at the time of creation and don't change.  Dynamic reports are Bi documents that are updated at the time they are requested.  A BI server is a Web server application that is purpose-built for the publishing of business intelligence.  BI servers provide two major functions:  management and delivery.