Business Intelligence: An Integrated Approach

Business intelligence systems combine operational and historical data with analytical tools to present valuable and competitive information to business planners and decision makers. The objective of Business intelligence (BI) is to improve the timeliness and quality of information, and enable managers to be able to better understand the position of their firm as in comparison to competitors. Business intelligence applications and technologies can help companies to analyze changing trends in market share; changes in customer behavior and spending patterns; customers' preferences; company capabilities; and market conditions. Business intelligence can be used to help analysts and managers determine which adjustments are most likely to respond to changing trends. The emergence of the data warehouse as a repository, advances in data cleansing, increased capabilities of hardware and software, and the emergence of the web architecture all combine to create a richer business intelligence environment than was available previously. In this paper, an attempt has been made to present a framework for building a BI system.