Business Intelligence Can Only Be as Strong as Enterprise Infrastructure

Terabytes of data upon more terabytes of data can be a burden on data management if the data is not utilized by business intelligence. A recent Forbes article, "Three Ways to Make Big Data Make Money," discusses three analytical approaches to unearthing the opportunities within mounds of data.

While big data solutions may not serve a competitive advantage forever, there are currently many consumer-focused businesses that are cashing in on both the large volumes of data available and the technologies that can extract insights.

According to the article:

Typically, various data “cubes” that can be queried by normal Business Intelligence (BI) tools are hived off by taking abstractions (e.g., transactions summarized to units, sales and margin by product by store by day) or subsets (e.g., all transactions in one product department for the last 12 months) of the complete database.  Major BI tools answer descriptive questions such as “What is the most common product to be bought with diapers?” or “On what day of the week do we sell the most beer in Pittsburgh?”  Cubes are created because of processing speed constraints.

This is just one example of how business intelligence tools work. The key idea to remember is that business intelligence can only be as strong as the enterprise infrastructure that supports it.

Megan Feil, July 6, 2012