Business Intelligence - Additional Material

Business intelligence (BI) is the collection of best practices and software tools developed to support business decision making in this age of globalization, emerging markets, rapid change, and increasing regulation. The complexity and range of information required to support business decisions has increased, and operational database structures were unable to support all of these requirements. Therefore, a new data storage facility, called a data warehouse, developed. The data warehouse extracts its data from operational databases as well as from external sources, providing a more comprehensive data pool.

Additionally, new ways to analyze and present decision support data were developed. Online analytical processing (OLAP) provides advanced data analysis and visualization tools, including multidimensional data analysis. This chapter explores the main concepts and components of business intelligence and decision support systems that gather, generate, and present information for business decision makers, focusing especially on the use of data warehouses, data analytics, and data visualization.