Created by Matthew Elphick
Set of techniques & tools to transform data into useful information for analysis.
A decision aiding tool
Transforms data into something useful that can be analysed.
Front end, relies on data.
A repository of different sources of data structured for query and analysis.
Back end, behind-the-scenes.
Data in one location to simplify access.
This means that the sources and warehouse do not affect each other.
Simplification and centralisation of query logic.
Tracks change via historical snapshots of when data changes, useful as transaction systems may not.
Data structure optimised for reading large amounts of data on demand.
Usually this is as a browser application.
Back in 2009 there was a report predicting the top BI trends -
Ideas on topics of data compression and general processing acceleration for hardware and software generally lead to lower power consumption, contributing to a greener approach.
Data Warehouses may exist in Data Centers, which have had several best practices guides proposed, such as one by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy in 2011.
These guides suggest approaches such as waste heat recycling, on-site generation, cooling systems, and air management.
In 2009, Facebook had 360 million monthly active users.
By 2014, they had 1,393 million monthly active users.
There have been issues with bringing together the traditional quantitative data and the qualitative social media data.
This issue is lessened by BI systems that can manage both structured and unstructured data.
There are still issues with privacy in this area that have yet to be fully considered.
In 2000, Latanya Sweeney found that 87% of all Americans could be identified with only 3 pieces of information - (ZIP code, birthdate, sex).
In 2012, Target figured out a girl was pregnant before her father knew.
...deferential privacy, a way of letting people make statistical queries on some kind of records without seeing the records themselves.
Kira Radinsky (Co-founder of SalesPredict) in 2014
At the moment this is a growing area that's branching in two different directions.
A product of the second approach is the Social Business Index, launched in 2011, that provides an insight into how 'social' a company is.
This has become an overwhelmingly important factor in first-time BI buyers. (40% mention is as their top priority.)
It is closely linked to dashboards.
(Which ~100% of buyers cite as their top requested tool.)
With the growing use and complexity of BI, it is more important to make the information easier to consume.
This is area is impacting on Mobile BI.
Used with the Storytelling approach as an effective way to convey data.
Some may struggle with data-driven decision making because they don’t know the story behind the data.
The idea is that the visualisation is something that is created from the story.
AIm to influence and enagage on an emotional and logical level.
Can allow interactive exploration or perhaps acts as graphical elements with an intended interface.
There remains issues with this, and Mobile BI is still in the 'early adopter' phase, and has yet to fully mature.
Some issues include Security Considerations at different levels.
Despite this, in a June 2012 CFO Magazine Survey, 89% ranked Mobility as the #1 technology of importance to their company's success over the next three years.
MicroStrategy released MicroStrategy Mobile for iPhone in 2010, and an Android version followed shortly in 2011.
JasperSoft (acquired in 2014 by TIBCO) also provided an open source SDK to help build mobile BI apps alongside their own native iPhone, and non-native iPad apps.
There are other Mobile BI products, such as Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile, IBM's Cognos Business Intelligence, and Tableau Server.
Recent entrants into the BI space include Zoomdata (founded 2012), which focuses on real-time and unstructured data, via data models in Hadoop, MongoDB or Cassandra.
In 2014 storytelling was a popular subject of dicussion, including by the likes of Google and Harvard Business Review.
Google in particular suggests that a hybrid author-reader approach based on research by the Standford Visualisation Group, with them demonstrating the approach via their The Customer Journey to Online Purchase Tool.
This approach is similar to the Data Journalism trend that is occuring in media, and the fact that some BI systems are now being used in this area as well may impact the path they will take, or may create new, specialised, systems.
In 2014 research indicates that employees are more likely to use cloud-based BI tools compared to traditional tools.
Focusing on the Cloud, with recent acquisitions and the launch of Hana Cloud, which can be used to deploy Business Intelligence. In such a case Hana can be used as a platform and as a data source.
In 2014 Microsoft released PowerBI, their move into the Business Intelligence sector.
A key feature of PowerBI is that it provides access to natural language queries.
They are also looking to incorporate the newly launched Azure Machine Learning Service.
The inclusion of Machine Learning will allow applications to not only provide current status results and responses to queries, but to also begin to make predictions, play out hypothetical scenarios and also to learn to make suggestions.