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Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence means a lot of different things to different people.  As early as 1996, the Gartner Group was already using the term to describe a collective body of tools to perform data analysis, reporting and query used to "wade through the sea of data" and to synthesize and extract valuable information.  They suggested that by the year 2000, forward thinking companies would be required to make information broadly available to their employees through BI tool sets in order to maintain their competitive advantage.

In a recent poll, 55% of executives confessed to having multiple departments responsible for business intelligence resulting in a siloed data culture.  Even more surprising is that 61% of companies still rely on spreadsheets to track corporate performance and 35% do not even have a reporting tool in place.  Clearly the industry has a ways to go.

BI Solutions

While an effective data warehousing program plays a central role in the promises of BI, it is not a prerequisite to getting started.  BI is primarily about getting the right information in the hands of the right people at the right time.  Decision Source has a proven track record of helping companies of all sizes walk down the path to BI success through:

  • Web Portals - Today, like many other corporate applications, BI delivery is often delivered in a web front-end.  Our portal solutions allow you to centrally manage your BI environment in a true zero client footprint allowing you to focus on information delivery, not application support.
  • Scorecards - Scorecards and dashboards are a common component in most Corporate Performance Management initiatives.  Scorecards provide an intuitive mechanism for managing key performance indicators at all levels of your organization.
  • Dashboards - Dashboards provide a graphical starting point for quickly assessing managed points of your enterprise.  Very often, dashboards also have built in capability to drill into more specific information such as reports, OLAP cubes, or other BU related content.
  • OLAP - On line analytical processing.  OLAP provide the analyst the opportunity to drill up, down and across in pre-aggregated data cubes to rapidly find trends and get the answers to many high to moderate-level questions.  Like dashboards, cubes often have the capability to navigate from a given data intersection into a detailed report to see the detailed factors that generated the located trend.
  • Reporting - Reporting is probably the most basic aspect of a BI delivery system.  Unlike spreadsheets that must be compiled each time, reports pull their data from operational or warehouse sources and can be run at will, scheduled, and published for viewing by other team members.
  • Notifications - BI is at its core a self service delivery platform.  However, many organizations find it helpful to be able to define conditions that will generate a notification when they occur.  For example, notify a manager when inventory levels for widget X reach a set level.  Notifications allow users to react before problems occur instead of reacting after the fact.

Whether you are looking for a custom developed solution or a commercial product implementation, Decision Source has the right combination of development and services expertise coupled with strategic industry relationships to guide and partner with your company through all phases of a BI program.

Links of Interest
More Information

For more information, contact us at 615.321.3580 or via email at info@decisionsource.com.

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