DEMYSTIFYING Business Intelligence

Today, I am going to share my know-how about the origin of Business Intelligence.

In the late 70’s, few people had a vision that companies will find it very difficult to maintain paperwork and would require some system where they could store all the data. These visionary people hit the nail on the head. With globalization, tons of data started moving across geographies, things became imminent that no company can exist without database engines.

These visionary people now lead the database giants in Oracle and SAP which now hold most of database market share underlying their vision.

The way in late 70’s these people had a vision that organizations won’t survive with the paperwork and had to go database systems, In late 90’s, few people had the vision that with globalization coming on, these databases will just be rendered as a data dumping zone which would be not very useful for analysis. These people had a philosophy which said, data is of no use unless organized in a decent way.

Just to add an example in a simpler way,

If I register 1000 transactions daily, I can handle it with paperwork. Now, if my daily transactions turn up to 100000, it becomes very tedious to handle all through paperwork. Again, more the paperwork, more the manual errors. So, now is the database. With 100000 daily, my monthly records will be 30*100000 and yearly will be 30*12*100000 and again multiplied by the number of years from the deployment of system in organization till date, this is for a specific country, then number of countries the company exists. Database can still be useful for analyzing this data. Looked great at starting year of the system, but decades later the data analysis becomes very difficult.

Say for example, I query a database with 100000 records to retrieve a single transaction, it will return me the result in micro seconds, but decades later my number of transactions in database are Number of Entities * Number of years * 30 * 12 * 100000. If I query database whose size is tons of terabytes to retrieve a single record, it would take lot of time. Now, here comes Business Intelligence Tools in picture.

What BI (Business Intelligence) tools do is from the entire set of transactions, they extract and store only specific transactions which are useful for analysis by the top level management and put an engine in place which is designed for faster retrieval. Further, just to add icing on the cake, they add good looking charts and graphs which attracts the management to buy it.

Please don’t misread my lines, even today everything can be done through paperwork, it’s just that Database Engines do it better. In a similar way, every reporting or analysis need can be satisfied with Database Engines, it’s just that BI tools do it better.

Hope, this was informative, more to follow soon.