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Business intelligence is a data analysis process aimed at boosting business performance by helping corporate executives and other end users make more informed decisions.

Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven process for analyzing data and presenting actionable information to help corporate executives, business managers and other end users make more informed business decisions.

BI encompasses a variety of tools, applications and methodologies that enable organizations to collect data from internal systems and external sources, prepare it for analysis, develop and run queries against the data, and create reports, dashboards and data visualizations to make the analytical results available to corporate decision makers as well as operational workers.

Integration BI infrastructure: All tools in the platform use the same security, metadata, administration, portal integration, object model and query engine, and should share the same look and feel. Metadata management: Tools should leverage the same metadata, and the tools should provide a robust way to search, capture, store, reuse and publish metadata objects, such as dimensions, hierarchies, measures, performance metrics and report layout objects. Development tools: The platform should provide a set of programmatic and visual tools, coupled with a software developer's kit for creating analytic applications, integrating them into a business process, and/or embedding them in another application. Collaboration: Enables users to share and discuss information and analytic content, and/or to manage hierarchies and metrics via discussion threads, chat and annotations.

Information Delivery Reporting: Provides the ability to create formatted and interactive reports, with or without parameters, with highly scalable distribution and scheduling capabilities. Dashboards: Includes the ability to publish Web-based or mobile reports with intuitive interactive displays that indicate the state of a performance metric compared with a goal or target value. Increasingly, dashboards are used to disseminate real-time data from operational applications, or in conjunction with a complex-event processing engine. Ad hoc query: Enables users to ask their own questions of the data, without relying on IT to create a report. In particular, the tools must have a robust semantic layer to enable users to navigate available data sources. Microsoft Office integration: Sometimes, Microsoft Office (particularly Excel) acts as the reporting or analytics client. In these cases, it is vital that the tool provides integration with Microsoft Office, including support for document and presentation formats, formulas, data "refreshes" and pivot tables. Advanced integration includes cell locking and write-back. Search-based BI: Applies a search index to structured and unstructured data sources and maps them into a classification structure of dimensions and measures that users can easily navigate and explore using a search interface. Mobile BI: Enables organizations to deliver analytic content to mobile devices in a publishing and/or interactive mode, and takes advantage of the mobile client's location awareness.

Analysis Online analytical processing (OLAP): Enables users to analyze data with fast query and calculation performance, enabling a style of analysis known as "slicing and dicing." Users are able to navigate multidimensional drill paths. They also have the ability to write back values to a proprietary database for planning and "what if" modeling purposes. This capability could span a variety of data architectures (such as relational or multidimensional) and storage architectures (such as disk-based or in-memory). Interactive visualization: Gives users the ability to display numerous aspects of the data more efficiently by using interactive pictures and charts, instead of rows and columns. Predictive modeling and data mining: Enables organizations to classify categorical variables, and to estimate continuous variables using mathematical algorithms. Scorecards: These take the metrics displayed in a dashboard a step further by applying them to a strategy map that aligns key performance indicators (KPIs) with a strategic objective. Prescriptive modeling, simulation and optimization: Supports decision making by enabling organizations to select the correct value of a variable based on a set of constraints for deterministic processes, and by modeling outcomes for stochastic processes.

we can also proactively identify interested buyers based on their digital body language.

f you are running a large Oracle data warehouse you should be using parallel

Like all tools you have to use parallel correctly; no more would we think of using a wrench to hammer a nail then should you think parallel is the answer to all performance problems. Sometimes parallel will make things worse, sometimes parallel will make performance less predictable.

Parallel introduces additional work to a query, simplistically we need to: split the query into multiple parallel processes, execute them, wait for the processes to complete and finally coordinate the results. This all takes time to do. Our time saving comes from being able to process multiple smaller chunks of data simultaneously. If the time to execute the step in parallel is not significantly faster than doing it without parallel then the additional overhead may make parallel processing a slower option; this is typically the case with small tables where a full tablescan or an indexed access is fast. Use too few parallel processes and we will not gain much in performance, too many and we risk starving the database of resource for other work or even slow our own process as it waits for resource. If you have implemented some form of CPU resource management on your system you may find that you experience delays as your parallel slaves ‘wait their turn’

The tag-management industry is growing rapidly, as tags are critical to gathering data about your customers.

It's the early days for tag management, but the industry is growing rapidly because it's not so much about tags, but about the bigger challenge of using digital data.

Where does tag management fit in the data picture? Here's an example someone shared with me recently: He had gone to an antivirus product's website, read the reviews, and bought the software. In the days that followed, however, he suddenly began to see banner ads from that same software maker whenever he visited CNN, ESPN, and other favorite websites. The software maker knew he had visited its website, but not that he already bought the product. They were retargeting him with banner ads at unnecessary cost and no purpose.

Big Data has been all the rage. But fast data, even if it is small, can be more valuable than complicated masses of information.

Here's why: All the focus on "bigger is better" has overlooked the fact that most Big Data segments have not been validated with a business application or value.

Those kinds of analytics can help you find the right streams to access and work with, and also can help you build out robust programs that identify valuable customers.

Gartner defines advanced analytics as, "the analysis of all kinds of data using sophisticated quantitative methods (for example, statistics, descriptive and predictive data mining, simulation and optimization) to produce insights that traditional approaches to business intelligence (BI) — such as query and reporting — are unlikely to discover."

packaged analytics applications that target specific business domains

Revolution Analytics