Business Intelligence: An overview

Book excerpt: Business organizations develop strategies and set targets which focus on maximizing profit, reduce cost, improving customer satisfaction & retention and operational performance. In order to achieve the set targets, organizations need to continuously monitor status of organizational performance. Organizations need to collect, store, organize, transform the data to know the current status of set targets. Business Intelligence tools help the organizations to draw meaningful and actionable insights from the raw data in achieving the set targets. Business Intelligence tools help the organizations to answer questions such as where the organization stands in terms of profitability, growth status, brand & market position and market segment. Business intelligence tools focuses mainly on the past or current data and try to explore the hidden insight from the data. Business intelligence tools include querying, reporting, online analytics and data visualization tools which help the business decision makers to arrive at informed decision about the impact and status of their strategies. This book starts with the introduction of business intelligence concepts, components of business intelligence system, business intelligence tools used for querying, reporting and visualization of data. It provides an overview of the data visualization and data mining methods like classification, clustering and regression methods using R open source software. Book also covers some of the basic descriptive and inferential statistical tools. It focuses on both managerial side and technological side of BI. Vinaitheerthan Renganathan www.vinatheerthan.com/book.php