Business Intelligence
Competitive organizations accumulate business intelligence (BI) in order to gain sustainable competitive advantage 5. The challenges of BI are to collect and structure large volumes of data that are generated in the organization, to discern patterns and meaning within that data (thus cultivating data into information) and to respond to this information in an informed and effective way.
The technologies that support this highly strategic activity of an organization deal with functions such as:
- Data mining: also known as knowledge-discovery in databases (KDD), is the practice of automatically analysing large stores of data for patterns. To do this, data mining uses computational techniques from statistics, machine learning and pattern recognition.
- Data warehousing: primarily a record of an enterprise's past transactional and operational information, stored in a database designed to favour efficient data analysis and reporting.
- OLAP or Analytics: providing the technical infrastructure needed to be able to query for valuable strategic information (trends, strengths and weaknesses, competitive advantages, business performance) by accessing one or multiple data warehouses.
The open source space offers solutions that are rapidly gathering strength in these areas. The table below lists representative examples of projects that should be considered as candidate foundation for a BI solution or solution component.
Maximus 2008 Reloaded 11
