NOVEMBER 2019CIOAPPLICATIONSEUROPE.COM8IN MYOPINIONusiness Intelligence (BI) is the process of converting data into useful, actionable information for decision-makers in business situations. BI comes to life with several names such as real-time reporting, online analytical processing, predictive analytics, and data mining.Although the rapid and versatile development of tools has stressed the science side of the process, human aspects such as message selection, presentation of options like colors or icons reflect the design side. This combination of science and design skills makes BI attractive to creative employees, as well as adding value to the business.Processing more and more dataIf we start with one single unique data point, it is not enough to create any intelligence; at least two data points are necessary to reach a conclusion. For example, a single data point indicating that I have two apples is not enough to provide any useful or actionable information, but when I have the second data point everything changes:- my average daily consumption is one apple, so plan to go to market in two days- my fridge capacity is three apples so available capacity is one apple, therefore don't buy more than one apple at the marketAs the simple example above shows, the more data we have, the more intelligence we can generate. Driven with this motivation, BI experts are striving to gather as much data as possible, ideally providing the highest level of granularity.How does data matter?Until recent decades, data had predominantly been generated internally through manual effort and has come with a significant associated cost. The introduction of recent technologies and sources such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Web click tracking, and Open Data sources have simplified the data collection process and satisfied the need for massive volume. Now it is possible to collect real-time data from numerous devices, internal and external websites, curated libraries of government, market and generic data in addition to the traditional line of business applications. As an example, World Bank Open Data provides 3,000 datasets and 14,000 indicators encompassing microdata, time series statistics, and geospatial data.Current technological developments, both internal and external, mean that organizations can now access enough data to create intelligence in a practical way.Is having data enough?Having copious data in many different formats such as database, semi-structured, voice, video can cause some unforeseen problems. When you have a huge volume of data, you need to have effective storage management (online, nearline, offline, etc.) and massive processing power for the exponentially growing calculation load. Recently, those needs have started to be addressed with cloud solutions and provision of those assets as XaaS (Everything as a service, let A Brief Definition of Business IntelligenceKUDRET SOYTURK, HEAD OF BUSINESS DATA INTELLIGENCE, ATOS [EPA: ATO]BKudret Soyturk
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