BI Pyramid

The BI Pyramid speaks about people, process that need to be involved from the get go to achieve the desired results. 

It is important that an organization undertakes a BI initiative when there is a Business need to do so. When I say that I mean - that when the Director Marketing is working through the existing sales data and cannot answer critical questions like, 'What were the companies sales in the year 2000 for product A in North America?' Or when he wants to answer a question like - 'Given our past performance, how much inventory should we maintain around Christmas time next year?', he would want to invest in a system that will get him those answers which will help him plan and report the progress of his division. Thus he will be willing to sponsor such an initiative for the marketing division and would be in a position to influence his managers to participate in such initiatives as well.

What makes the BI Framework?

Based on my last post on what is BI, and based on the definition of framework i.e. "A framework is a basic conceptual structure used to solve or address complex issue", I understand BI Framework is a very generic term that would be made of components like analytics, data mining, bench marking and OLAP such that they reside in a common application and generate reports for the business reference and use.

What is Business Intelligence?

BI is a set of skills (analytical, reporting), technologies (data mining, text mining, predictive analytics), tools (Informatica), practices (OnLine Analytical Processing OLAP, Benchmarking) that help businesses acquire better understanding of its commercial (sales, promotions, revenue) context.

BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations.

To define it simplistically BI is a group of concepts and methods used to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems.