CIO Council Report: Business Intelligence and Business Analytics
Author:
September 2007
Drowning in data with nary a drop of information. We people of Earth are creating exabytes* of data each year. The cost to store data is less than one-hundredth of the cost ten years ago and continues to drop unabated. Against this backdrop, the CIO Council spent its June meeting discussing the people, processes and technology required to turn a mountain of data into the business insight. The session was facilitated by Sinclair Community College, a progressive user of data warehousing and data mining tools.
The purpose of business intelligence is to provide a set of decision support tools to drive business process improvement. Data is extracted from one or more transactional systems and loaded into databases especially crafted to enable effective ad hoc user access. In many cases it also provides operational reporting through predefined reports, relieving the transactional system from this added burden. Business intelligence evolves over time, typically going through a series of phases as its tools are learned, the data explored and insights lead to more advanced analysis. These phases are broken down as follows:
- Reporting - What does the business look like?
- Analysis - What are the business problems?
- Alerts - What actions are needed?
- Statistical Analysis - What is this happening?
- Predictive Modeling What will happen and how likely will it happen?
- Optimization - What's the best that can happen?
The business intelligence journey requires combining business, analytic and information technology skills. In many organizations, at the heart of this team lies a competency center dedicated to merging all these skills into business solutions. But be ready to invest in these multi-talented people, they command an average salary of $90K per year. Business analytics is a powerful competitive tool. Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris have described the power of "analytic competitors" in their recent book titled "Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning".
Companies that use their analytic prowess not just to enhance their operations but as their lead competitive differentiator. The Dayton region is home to Teradata, a leader in Enterprise Data Warehousing. To learn more about Teradata, visit www.teradata.com.
Sinclair Community College offers SAS business intelligence training. To learn more about SAS business intelligence, visit www.sinclair.edu. For more information on this topic, please contact Ann Gallaher, Chief Operating Officer, at 937.229.9072 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
* Note: 1 exabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes = 1018 bytes
