BI Environment and Business Flow:
Business Intelligence is all about converting large amounts of corporate data into useful information, thereby triggering some profitable business action with the help of knowledge acquired through BI analysis. Implementing BI is a long process and it requires a lot of analysis and investment. A typical BI environment involves business models, data models, data sources, ETL, tools needed to transform and organize the data into useful information, target data warehouse, data marts, OLAP analysis and reporting tools.
Setting up a Business Intelligence environment not only rely on tools, techniques and processes, it also requires skilled business people to carefully drive these in the right direction. Care should be taken in understanding the business requirements, setting up the targets, analyzing and defining the various processes associated with these, determining what kind of data needed to be analysed, determining the source and target for that data, defining how to integrate that data for BI analysis and determining and gathering the tools and techniques to achieve this goal.
Following sections explain each of these areas in detail and the sample figure shows a BI environment in its simplest form:
