Talk:Business intelligence

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[edit] Original posting

<SethGrimes>25 October 2007 --

Here I was, cleaning up this horrendous article when I saved an edit and was hit by a big copyright violation notice??? How am I supposed to clean up this cruft now? —Preceding unsigned comment added by SethGrimes (talk • contribs) 02:20, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Hey Seth, try signing in before you make edits. LOL

This article is horrendous, but I don't even know where to start. Neil Raden (talk) 00:46, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

<Parikshit Basrur> 10:38, Dec , 2006 (AKL)

The audience seems to have reached mutual consent that this article needs a rewrite. BI is a term which has links with a number of different industries, and hence, community members who would like to believe that they can be effective and make contributions in each sector should work on each section.

Vendor links would be appropriate keeping in essence with the community focus of Wikipedia, and development of this posting will result in revisions of the content on BI.

Regards, Baz

This article is OK, but reads like a promotional white paper. The use of first-person is not particularly acceptable.

I'll be marking this one for a big editing pen unless someone else gets there first. I've removed some links that pointed to specific vendors - either we list ALL vendors or we don't list any. Manning 04:22, Nov 19, 2004 (UTC)


I'll add a cleanup and mention it in the Business and Economics forum. saturnight 00:10, Feb 8, 2005 (UTC)

I'd like to second the comment that this page needs work. I'm been in the "BI/DW" field for a decade and this page says little nothing about what we do or aim to do. I can live with that, but can we change the two items in the article that are particular bothersome.

First up, the opening line doesn't seem grammatically correct to me.

"BI is the process of gathering information in the field of business"

I cannot imagine going away to "do some Business Intelligence", "gathering Business Intelligence", or "doing Business Intelligence" (except in the consulting context). I've never heard the term used to refer to a process or an activity. If I look for competitor information on the internet while at work - is this Business Intelligence? If I receive a report in the mail or buy a business magazine, is this business intelligence?

Perhaps this is the Gartner definition, but the IT industry tends to use the term differently. In this area the term "BI" is normally used in relation to capability. More specifically, a BI tool usually makes some claim to advanced interaction in the context of information delivery, presentation and analysis.

This is not a definition. I am deliberately avoiding posting a definition.

My second point relates to the history section. Sun Tzu. Whether we accept BI as a contemporary business term, or instead define it as a general concept - the link to Sun Tzu needs to be substantiated and shown to be more relevant than influences by other ancient thinkers. Unless this is done - the reference should be dropped. [R. Gowan roxl@ozemail.com.au]

[edit] BI and DW/technology

bharat.pathiavadi@rediffmail.com --> I doubt technology has anything whatsoever to do with the idea behind Business Intelligence. So being in the DW scene for a long time doesnt mean anything really. DW or technology is only one of the means of providing BI with a data source. It doesnt make BI a only "DW" kind of project. BI is an organization mindframe and not a technology project. One of the reasons most IT projects in this space fail miserably is because it is believed that DW (which is though of as synonymous with BI) is an ultimate answer to business information requirements. This simply isnt true.

The other point is quite true. There is no standard definition of Business Intelligence. Nor can there be one with will cover all aspects of it. In fact, this is true for almost all similar social sciences.. e.g: Economics.

And yes, i guess it would be a good idea to have alist of all vendors, though considering the facts at the moment (everyone is a guru in Warehousing / BI / BPM), I think it is quite difficult to come up with a full list. I guess you just leave that to the vendors as and when they find this page or to their employees. :-)

Colin McKay --> Could we at least please remove the reference to HP and Knightsbridge?? (In the Trends section) I whole heartedly support offering examples of vendors and of course referencing examples of acquisitions and consolidation but HP are certainly not a major player in BI. The reference to Knightsbridge being a leader in the BI industry can only be seen as a self-promoting comment. Knightsbridge are a profressional services firm only and don't even rate on the BI map. I'd suggest that we at least stick to those referred to by the Gartner Magic Quadrant? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 155.136.80.173 (talk) 12:39, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Competitive intelligence

Whats the difference between Business intelligence and Competitive intelligence? -- 172.178.67.23 09:16, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Business intelligence is an internal view of one's own company's operational benchmarks and metrics. Competitive intelligence is generally some formal report prepared by third parties giving an assessment of competitor's products, strategies and practices. Competitive intelligence is generally used for an advantage in sales & marketing and sometimes in mergers & acquisitions. Business intelligence is used to generate productivity within one's own operations.

bharat.pathiavadi@rediffmail.com--> I think Business intelligence involves both internal and external intelligence. a business doesnt run within itself. It runs and interacts with a world out there. So operational intelligence and Market intelligence are both important. In fact, I have worked on atleast 15 projects which actually have key performance indicators from internal and external sources.

Competitive Intelligence is just one form, or one area of Business Intelligence. 147.240.236.9 20:33, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

The bove contest says Business intaligence is internal the what is Competitive intelligence. I dont beleave the defanition is exactly correct. If the above is correct can anybody explain what is the role of Databeacon in the above. Is it Business Inteligence of Compitative intaligence

[edit] External Links

Moved here from the main page:

  • [http://www.obisomni.com/home/ Obis Omni] a dedicated business community
  • [http://www.business-intelligence-guide.com Business Intelligence] Guide
  • [http://www.businessintelligence.org.uk/ Independent Business Intelligence Magazine]
  • [http://www.businessobjects.com Business Intelligence Software] from Business Objects
  • [http://www.informationbuilders.com Business Intelligence Software] from Information Builders
  • [http://www.sas.com/technologies/bi Business Intelligence] Software from SAS
  • [http://www.siebel.com/business-intelligence/software-solutions.shtm Business Intelligence] Software from Siebel
  • [http://www.intellibusiness.com IntelliBusiness.com]
  • [http://www.b-eye-network.com Business Intelligence Network]
  • [http://www.business-intelligence-software.biz Business Intelligence Software] Introduction Website
  • [http://www.googul.net/modules/zmagazine/article.php?articleid=50 Brand Your Consulting Brilliance]
  • [http://www.imgroup.com Information Management Group Ltd]
  • [http://www.kmining.com/info_conferences.html Kmining] List of business intelligence, data mining and KDD scientific conferences
  • [http://searchcrm.techtarget.com?offer=Wikipedia SearchCRM.com] Original daily news, white papers, expert advice, webcasts and other resources on business intelligence.
  • [http://www.saksoft.com SAKSOFT] A leading BI/BPM company in the Financial Services Domain

If you'd like to add these back in per Wikipedia:External links please discuss it here first.
brenneman(t)(c) 12:50, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

No, I vote for deletion, even on the talk page. JKW 18:01, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Red Links

I've moved the following red links here:

  • Data Modelling and tools for defining Business Logic Layers
  • Report Servers
  • Business workflow analysis
  • Business management systems p2p


brenneman(t)(c) 12:58, 21 July 2005 (UTC)

Can we draw a distinction between how the term Business Intelligence is used in the computing environment, and how it appears to be used by management theorists. They appear to be two quite different concepts - hence possibly some of the confusion surrounding/within this entry. Since the two terms are quite different, I would suggest there is a need for two separate, tightly defined, articles dealing with each. williampayne@cix.co.uk

Removed one of the broken links for BI News. SanjayG.

[edit] Permission to Include External Link

Hi, I'd like permission to include the link below to the Business Intelligence Knowledge Center at Computerworld.com (link redacted) Computerworld Magazine - The Business Intelligence research center includes the latest news, features, analyses, forums, best practices, research links and more. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Bansipatel (talk • contribs) 15:59, 19 February 2007 (UTC).

To be quite honest, it seems to simply be a pretty hit or miss search result aggregation engine covered in commercial ads and unrelated links/news. I'm not sure how it adds to this article. Kuru talk 00:42, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
I would rather vote for deleting all those external links even from the talk pages! JKW 22:43, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
Indeed, the discussion is stale, so I've removed that link. Kuru talk 22:54, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] What Is BI?

When Howard Dresner coined the term in 1989 (and he was still at Digital, he didn't join Gartner for two more years), he was referring to the software tools that provided reporting, analysis and planning capabilities to business, not data warehousing. Data warehousing had not quite emerged at that point.

If you search the literature, you will find that BI and DW were on separate tracks. Lumping the IT-centric DW process in with BI is very misleading. BI is directed at knowledge workers and those they inform, and, only recently, lower-level operational decision-making and more automated processes such as rules engines or what Fair Isaac calls Enterprise Decision Management. Data Warehousing is a cumbersome, lengthy process of gathering second-hand data and creating a permanent repository.

It is fashionable in DW these days to speak of the "Single Version of the Truth," but in the BI world, it is more important to consider different possibilities and scenarios. This is a stark delineation between the two and explains the typical chasm between the IT organization that manages the DW and the business users who work with BI.

Consider this - if data were smart enough, endowed with the contextual information to be self-describing and unambiguously accurate semantically, and there were sufficient bandwidth and processing power to query original data for BI without extracting it and maintaining another repository of this transformed data, there would still be a need for the consumers of this information to understand it, manipulate it, share it, model with it and, for that matter, for unattended agents to do the same. That is BI. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Nraden (talk • contribs) 15:49, 31 March 2007 (UTC).

I am going to propose that we rewrite this as I agree with the comment that it reads like a promotional whitepaper. The field of business intelligence does encompass the technology that would include data management / integration (a subset of which would include data warehousing, ETL, OLAP, etc). In my view it also includes the generation of analysis & insight(quantitative and qualitative methods) and the discipline of organizing and presenting actionable information to decision-makers (including the in-fashion areas of scorecard-dashboards, information-rich workflow, portals, etc.). How much of it is purely a technology function or how much is broader and discipline / process-driven remains to be seen. It could be an interesting article as it is getting a lot of attention. who else is working on rewrites to this?

Jarrardj 22:11, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

"What is BI?" An oxymoron, of course. :-) — xDanielx T/C 06:18, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Expert help needed: Spotfire

Can please some experts have a look at the Spotfire article. JKW 22:45, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] copyright issue

Much of this article's text is the same as that found on other, copyrighted, websites. Two examples are:

http://www.symbiosis-technology.com/WhyClientsChooseUs/tabid/206/Default.aspx

http://projectmanagementacademy.com/biimplementation.htm

This raises the issue of who copied whom, and whether there is a copyright violation issue for WP to pursue against this article, or against others. --rich<Rich Janis 20:28, 17 August 2007 (UTC)>

The second one is clearly copied from here. Heck, they didn't even clear the "To meet Wikipedia's quality standards, the remainder of this article may require cleanup." tag from the text they cut&pasted. No idea on the first one - it is currently offline (for the record, I'm hoping one of their bullet points on 'why customers choose us' isn't 'stability and uptime'). Kuru talk 22:02, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Precision Needed

There is a Business Intelligence industry composed of software vendors, consultants, media, analysts and even hardware vendors (appliances, for example). To say that BI is a business concept not a technology is correct, but it's also wrong. So I disagree with the comments above about the non-technology aspect of BI. The technology is, frankly, the aspect that most people are familiar with. Perhaps that is why, other than Excel, BI hasn't reached very far into organizations. In any case, there is no universal definition of BI because it is a vendor-driven concept. In most organizations, if you asked people if they were doing BI (and I've done this) they would say no, But if you asked them if they used Business Objects or SAS, they would say yes. If we are going to write a credible article about BI, we have to acknowledge all of its aspects, not, as some editors have done here, promote their particular perspective.

There is still fuzzy thinking about whether BI includes data warehousing, or whether data warehousing is part of data management. Discussions like these have little value because these disciplines don't fit into neat, taxonomic categories. They overlap. The B-Eye-Network is a good example. It alludes to BI with its name, but the content is largely tilted towards data warehousing and data quality. There is very little content about how people actually use the information.

For a few decades, interactive systems have been divided between those that support transactions and those that support reporting and analysis. BI is synonomous with the latter, but the two are converging and what is operational and what is analytical is getting unclear. For that reason, the term BI may, in a few years, become an historical artifact. Neil Raden 15:26, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

I see that there have been over a dozen editors on this article, but no real discussion on this page, just standalone statements. I'd prefer to get some consensus before I start editing the article itself. So please weigh in. I've published quite a bit, so my own opinions would be considered original research here, which is generally frowned upon. I can offer my two cents here on the discussion page, but I have to limit my editing to things I can source elsewhere. Also, I see a clean dividing line between BI as it's been practiced for the the past 15 years or so, and what is happening now. Neil Raden (talk) 16:02, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
Well, actually, if you've published, your articles might be relevant sources, but you shouldn't add them. (I'm not an expert. I followed an edit war on Intelligence over here. I just try to keep this sane and remove links to specific (non-notable) software.) — Arthur Rubin | (talk) 16:12, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
I won't even allude to them, but I have a pretty deep backgroud in this subject, and this page needs lots of work. Neil Raden (talk) 19:47, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
For a bit of clarification, here it states that self-citation is allowed, within reason. If you're citing your own work published in a journal, I'd say it's OK as long as you don't make it the centerpiece of the whole page. If you're citing other people's work (particularly if you can write for the enemy). Though it is a topic that requires delicacy. WLU (talk) 15:45, 4 February 2008 (UTC)
I wouldn't cite my own stuff, though I might metion something relevant here on the discussion page. But this article is in trouble. We're having reverts on whether the term was invented in 1958 or 1989. Wouldn't it be a better use of everyone's time to write about the subject instead? I read the article by IBM from 50 years ago and it isn't relevant. It did not envision the sorts of activities that we have in BI. Computers weren't even interactive at that point, there was no such thing as application software. I think the term used in 1958 is like a false cognate. But, if the editors want to say that IBM invented the term in 1958, fine, it is an insignificant historical oddity. Neil Raden (talk) 00:34, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Operational BI

This section was recently added completely uncited:

Currently organizations are moving towards Operational Business Intelligence, which is currently under-served and uncontested by vendors. Most BI vendors are targeting only the top of the pyramid, but now there is a paradigm shift moving toward taking BI to the bottom of the pyramid with Operational Business Intelligence. Vendors have realized it and are moving towards the same. Democratization of Business Intelligence is taking power away from the expert few and shifting it toward the masses. There are still major barriers to this democratization process. The primary challenge for any end user wishing to implement a BI solution operationally (that is, across the organization and perhaps below the level of executive management) is simply overcoming the technical skills required to access all of a solution's functionality.

The following external links were added, presumably as an attempt to support the paragraph: http://www.tdwi.org/Publications/WhatWorks/display.aspx?id=7976, http://video.tv18online.com/general/biztech/videos/whitepapers/nov07/IBAResearchReportonOperationalBI.pdf I cannot find support for the specific sweeping statements in the addition. I'm also not comfortable adding material to an encyclopedic article that reads like puffery and is supported by vendor produced material. If anyone can assist with providing neutral, third party references to the text, it would be greatly appreciated. Kuru talk 11:53, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Re-defining BI

I agree that the BI industry is changing and quickly. As many companies are being bought up by stack vendors there are as many new companies coming into play. There are a few still surviving on their own and changing the game. Providing new thinking through future technology and innovation will certainly continue to change the industry. These companies include Micro Strategies and QlikTech. There are also smaller companies that are niche solutions but these two are the larger ones that are competing with the stack vendors and still maintaining their independence.