BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE Tools and Techniques Essay

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE Tools and Techniques - Essay Example This is a change from the 30 responses required last year. III. There are 13 capabilities described by the author that must be delivered by BI platform. These 13 capabilities can be classified into 3 categories of functionality Integration Information delivery Analysis 1. INTEGRATION BI Infrastructure All tools, interfaces and applications in the platform should have same look and feel. Metadata Management The platform should have the ability to store, search, and capture and reuse the formats, measures, dimensions and report layouts. Development Tools It should provide programmatic development tools and visual development environment to facilitate scheduling, delivering, administering and managing. Collaboration It deals with sharing and discussing information throughout the organization. 2. INFORMATION DELIVERY Reporting It facilitates the reporting procedure by developing formatted and interactive reports in various dimensions (financial, operational, managerial, etc) Dashboards T his is a subset of reporting having the ability to publish web-based reports with interactive tools for display. Ad hoc Query This enables the user to ask their own questions and data queries rather than IT created reports. Microsoft Office Integration Integration with Microsoft tools, formats and formulas is necessary item to be provided. Search-Based BI Application of search index to both structured and unstructured data sources and their mapping enable user to search from (Google-like) interface. 3. ANALYSIS OLAP This enables user to analyze data with extremely fast query and calculation performance making analysis style of ‘slicing and dicing’ possible. Interactive Visualization It includes display of data in a more effective way using charts, tables and other formats. Predictive modeling and Data Mining It helps to classify categorical variables and continuous variables using advance mathematical techniques. Scorecards It implies the use of performance management m ethodology like six sigma and it involves analysis and comparisons. PART B 1. IBM (Cognos) solution has a broad functional footprint and is reporting-centric. It follows ‘information versus an applications agenda’. Information Builders’ WebFOCUS product has a very consumer-centric approach and is found to be as one of the industry's easiest-to-use solutions. It offers integrated search, mobile, use of rich Internet applications and mashups, predictive analytics, data discovery, and visualization but they lack self-service support, ad-hoc analysis, and OLAP capabilities. Microsoft offers low price but they do not provide a road map. MicroStrategy specializes in running deployments on top of large enterprise data warehouses tackling large volumes of data. Oracle offers domain-specific and prepackaged solutions. SAP offers data warehousing, text analytics, on-demand BI, search coupled with BI, metadata, data lineage and impact analysis, and data quality. SAS focuses on forecasting, predictive modeling, and optimization, as well as its investments in data discovery and visualization. QlikTech offers low-cost deployments. Tibco products have unique architecture, combining analytics and interactive