Newbridge technology Solutions Ltd
County Kildare

Tel:      00353 (0) 87 6593857
Email: info@newbridgetechnology.net
Web:   www.newbridgetechnology.ie

Business Intelligence

Putting business data at the heart of business intelligence…

Many organisations find that they have mountains of data but little in the way of useful business information. Business Intelligence (BI) is a discipline that improves business decision making by employing fact based and data driven support systems. BI comprises the processes and technologies for collecting, managing and reporting decision oriented data. BI empowers business users and decision makers to solve everyday business challenges.  NTS offer a range of BI services from diagnostic assessments to full BI implementations. Regardless of the type or size of organisation, our focus is singular; ensuring business managers have useful and relevant information available to them when they need it.

Business intelligence usage can be categorized into the following categories:

1. Business operations reporting

The most common form of business intelligence is business operations reporting. This includes the actuals and how the actuals stack up against the goals. This type of business intelligence often manifests itself in the standard weekly or monthly reports that need to be produced.

2. Forecasting

Many of you have no doubt run into the needs for forecasting, and all of you would agree that forecasting is both a science and an art. It is an art because one can never be sure what the future holds. What if competitors decide to spend a large amount of money in advertising? What if the price of a widget shoots up to €100 each? At the same time, it is also a science because one can extrapolate from historical data, so it's not a total guess.

3. Dashboard

The primary purpose of a dashboard is to convey the information at a glance. For this audience, there is little, if any, need for drilling down on the data. At the same time, presentation and ease of use are very important for a dashboard to be useful.

4. Multidimensional analysis

Multidimensional analysis is the "slicing and dicing" of the data. It offers good insight into the numbers at a more granular level. This requires a solid data warehousing backend, as well as business-savvy analysts to get to the necessary data.

5. Finding correlation among different factors

This is diving very deep into business intelligence. Questions asked are like, "How do different factors correlate to one another?" and "Are there significant time trends that can be leveraged/anticipated?"