Business Intelligence Software

As we discuss the possibility of emerging into business intelligence software we must keep in mind the overall purpose of using any type of software is to reach strategic goals in order to increase market shares. I will discuss how business intelligence software will allow us to meet those strategic goals. We will establish what type of information and analysis capabilities will be available once this business intelligence software is implemented. We will discuss hardware and system software that will be required to run specific business intelligence software. Lastly, I will give a brief synopsis on three vendors (IBM, Microsoft Microsoft and Oracle) that are dominating the business information software industry today.

The goal to any company succeeding in today’s fast paced high tech world is to establish aggressive strategic goals and a means to meet those goals. The end state of strategic goals is the capturing of your industry market share. Business intelligence software is a means or method to meet the goals. Business Intelligence Software brings together established software into a single working suite that will allow personnel from across the corporation to observe the same information in real time on a day-to-day basis. By implementing business intelligence software into our company, it will allow for a consolidated data collection point. This software will also allow us to tap into this consolidated data using multiple methods and display it in various forms or in real time using different web applications.

The information that can be extracted from the business information software is endless. In the article written by Alison Dragoon, Business Intelligence Get Smart(er), she states the following about data usage; “ “[Unused data] is still a great source of untapped productivity and competitive advantage for most companies," he says. Just how much data is going unused? Downes guesses companies are extracting value from only about 20 percent of their data.” With this stated by placing all pertinent information into one database allows personnel throughout the company to pull data that will assist in their daily duties. This data can be arranged to track the life cycle of any product from birth to grave. By tracking an item in this fashion allows us to alleviate faulty products in this process or to alleviate faulty processes in the manufacturing process. The sales department can use data information to track trends in sales. These sales trends can be sorted by geographical regions, industry specific or by an individual customer. The query selection of this type of data would only be restricted by imagination of the staff. Accounting/finance data will also be captured within this database linking accounting/finance information directly to customer data. This will allow management to pull information from sales, inventory, billing and total revenue. The data is endless; the true challenge comes from pulling information that will allow us to make decisions that lead to our strategic goals of larger market shares. I have discussed what most management would consider the backbone of business intelligence software, data management that allows us to run queries and report the queries for managing and production purposes. Information delivery is also a capability that comes from business intelligence software, information delivery can come in the form of emails that are programmed to deliver specified queries on a given day of the week or month or even daily. These same queries can be web based allowing associates to access pertinent information anywhere in the world they might be with internet access. Obviously this type of access brings up security issues, but all of the platforms that I have researched come with a very robust security program.

When looking at hardware requirements the initial question of Scale-up or Scale-out of resources must be answered. Scale-up refers to a very powerful hardware system that consists of ‘one’ large server that will be centrally located. Scale-out refers to the use of ‘many’ server’s that are located in different geographical locations. There are obvious advantages to both setups. The scale-up version allows us to reduce the requirement for a robust information technology team due to the central location of the server while reducing the number of nodes or users that can access the ‘one’ server. While the scale-out system will require a more robust information technology team spread throughout the corporation to service the various servers. Once this decision is made this will be the architecture that the system will be based on. The server or servers is the most significant change in our present