Название: Business Intelligence Demystified: Understand and Clear All Your Doubts and Misconceptions About BI
Автор: Anoop Kumar V.K.
Издательство: BPB Publications
Год: 2022
Страниц: 312
Язык: английский
Формат: epub
Размер: 10.1 MB

Clear your doubts about Business Intelligence and start your new journey.

The book demystifies misconceptions and misinformation about BI. It provides clarity to almost everything related to BI in a simplified and unbiased way.

It covers topics right from the definition of BI, terms used in the BI definition, coinage of BI, details of the different main uses of BI, processes that support the main uses, side benefits, and the level of importance of BI, various types of BI based on various parameters, main phases in the BI journey and the challenges faced in each of the phases in the BI journey. It clarifies myths about self-service BI and real-time BI. The book covers the structure of a typical internal BI team, BI organizational models, and the main roles in BI. It also clarifies the doubts around roles in BI. It explores the different components that add to the cost of BI and explains how to calculate the total cost of the ownership of BI and ROI for BI. It covers several ideas, including unconventional ideas to achieve BI success and also learn about IBI. It explains the different types of BI architectures, commonly used technologies, tools, and concepts in BI and provides clarity about the boundary of BI w.r.t technologies, tools, and concepts.

The book helps you lay a very strong foundation and provides the right perspective about BI. It enables you to start or restart your journey with BI.

Business Intelligence is an umbrella term that refers to the overall process in which information and insights are derived from data in a scalable, efficient, and on-going basis and made available to decision makers to support in data-driven decision-making in order to improve their business.

BI is a concept, it doesn’t prescribe any particular technology, tools, methodologies, or project/product management techniques. BI is agnostic to technologies, tools, and methodologies. BI, in most cases, is also not an off-the-shelf software or tool that you can simply buy, deploy, and expect it to magically work. To make it very clear, it is not necessary for all of the components of a BI solution to be sourced from the same vendor, we will see more on this topic of components of a BI solution in later chapters, specifically in chapter 9 and chapter 10. Just to provide you a quick idea, in one of the client projects that I worked, the BI solution consisted of IBM Datastage (an ETL tool), SAP Business Objects (an enterprise reporting and analytics platform) with direct web access for ad hoc query for internal users, Microsoft SQL Server (database for data warehouse), and an in-house built web portal for static reports delivery and access for both internal users and customers among other smaller components. The data warehouse was built using a top-down (Bill Inmon) approach with a staging layer, integration layer, and a customer data mart layer. This project initially used a waterfall project management methodology and then later switched to agile methodology. There were mainly two technical teams, one for new development and enhancements, and another responsible for production support. Both the teams had specialists in ETL tool and RAP.
Important note: The technical terms such as data warehouse, data mart, ETL, various data layers, etc are covered in chapters 9 and 10.

What you will learn:
- Builds a strong conceptual foundation in BI.
- Gives the right perspective and clarity on BI uses, challenges, and architectures.
- Enables you to make the right decisions on the BI structure, organization model, and budget.
- Explains which type of BI solution is required for your business.

Key Features:
- Includes successful methods and innovative ideas to achieve success with BI.
- Vendor-neutral, unbiased, and based on experience.
- Highlights practical challenges in BI journeys.
- Covers financial aspects along with technical aspects.
- Showcases multiple BI organization models and the structure of BI teams.

Who this book is for:
This book is a must-read for business managers, BI aspirants, CxOs, and all those who want to drive the business value with data-driven insights.

Table of Contents
1. What is Business Intelligence?
2. Why do Businesses need BI?
3. Types of Business Intelligence
4. Challenges in Business Intelligence
5. Roles in Business Intelligence
6. Financials of Business Intelligence
7. Ideas for Success with BI
8. Introduction to IBI
9. BI Architectures
10. Demystify Tech, Tools, and Concepts in BI