The world of Business Intelligence

Rain, Rain everywhere, but not a clean drop to drink

Data, data everywhere, but not a reliable byte to impact Business

In the good old days, data existed in memory (of the human brain) and passed on from the teacher to the taught, from a mentor to the mentee, from a parent to a child….

With the evolving human clan learning to record better and better, data transferred to different mediums and finally now persists in memory again (of computer chips).
There has been rapid progress and breath taking evolutions in the way data is now being gathered. As it became easier and cost effective to store, more data is being stored.

The more, the merrier huh? How do we really use the gazillion peta bytes around us.  Besides, is it reliable, accurate, and trustworthy?

The terms DSS(Decision Support System), MIS (Management Information System) have been replaced by Business Intelligence, competitive intelligence, Market analytics, drilling, predictions,
forecasting sciences. This all basically boils down to storing data the right way and enabling access to required folks quickly and easily. Data then becomes knowledge and information can be used to benefit

Wiki, aptly defines BI. Business intelligence (BI) "is the ability of an organization to collect, maintain, and organize data. This produces large amounts of information that can help develop new opportunities. Identifying these opportunities, and implementing an effective strategy, can provide a competitive market advantage and long-term stability"

Market is flooded with Infrastructure, Tools, Automation, Wizards to enable data storage, retrieval, Analytics, Mining with improved performance and visualization. We will look at Microsoft's offering in the space to include SQL Server 2012, office, SharePoint, Azure, Parallel data warehousing, Big data et al in the following blogs

Happy new year 2013 to all of you