Topic 1 - Introduction to Business Intelligence

This week's lecture is the introduction, which basically covers what is Business Intelligence and an overview. The explanation given in the lecture is Business Intelligence is about connecting data to effective action by drawing reliable conclusions about current conditions and future events. For people who are not familiar to Business Intelligence, the previous sentence may not mean anything. As we have taken Data Mining in year 2 semester 2, the sentence makes sense.

From what i have learnt in Data Mining, there is a cycle, which is the virtuous cycle of BI comprising of Understand-->Predict--> Act--> Understand (loop). Even though it has been a long time since i studied Data Mining, the lectures and tutorials are coming back into mind as i see this cycle. What this cycle basically means is to understand data, which can be past sales figures, through analyzing. After analysis, predict what will happen in future and act accordingly by setting up measures for example.

There was also a recap of the multidimensional database, star schema, snowflake schema and constellation schema. There is also a comparision of operational database and data warehouse. There was a preview of what we would be doing in future lab lessons, which are scorecards and dashboards. The software that we will be using is DataMicron Performa. More information about Performa can be found here at http://www.datamicron.com/Products/performa.aspx.