Posted by Pedro Perfeito, July 6, 2010

The concept of Business Intelligence (BI) is related to the ability to provide information with quality, at the right time to all layers of an organization (strategic, tactical and operational) making it more competitive today than yesterday and more competitive tomorrow than today. The term was officially coined in 1989 by Howard Dresner, but the practices inherent in this concept have always been present in our daily lives. In my perspective, the best definition for BI term comes from my main reference in this area: “Business Intelligence is the art of well define and inform a management problem”, Drª Maria José Trigueiros, 2007. The purpose of BI is to resolve management problems… if there is no problem then you don’t need BI, because BI is not intended to create new problems…These management problems could be naturally complex because could not be known the solution, or even because may be poorly defined or require extra learning. And the real intelligence comes from this capability of well define the problem to be solved.

A BI system does not compete directly with well-known operating systems that still have a key role in maintaining the daily operations of a company. These systems are maintained largely by operational employees that are targeted and well, to perform support activities and not business optimization. Therefore, the decision makers need to have their own systems where they store their own models for analysis and where they quickly and intuitively identify the status of their company through a simple click. In a traditional perspective, BI is largely associated with technology, because when the concept emerged, the main objective was to answer the needs to integrate data from several heterogeneous sources. It is true that technology plays a very important role in the evolution that has been observed, however, by itself technology does not achieve the main objective of BI: support decision making.

My purpose on this community is to share my opinions and perspectives from the several research’s that I’m currently doing in this area and also from the real world experience, not only from my daily work as BI consultant, but also from theoric and practice answers I give every day through the several communities I participate like MSDN forums, Experts-Exchange and BI Resort communities. I hope to receive feedback from you and also hope that you enjoy what I’ll publish here.

Pedro Perfeito