(6a) How Can BI Systems Help You Drive Your Business?

Business Intelligence (BI) systems can do one or more of the following for you:
(1) Report KPIs and other data, typically in a "dashboard"
(2) Provide analysis of the dashboard figures into greater detail
(3) Provide forecasting facilities to derive forecasts and budgets

These are all things you need to understand, manage, and drive your business.

BI systems will typically support at least a basic form of consolidation, to pull together sub-entities into the whole entity. Conversely you can analyse an entity out to sub-entities. Further analysis out to sub-sub-entities etc is possible in a multi-level cascade. KPIs can be similarly defined in a cascade.

BI systems will also typically allow you to present data and trends in a variety of graphical formats, such as pie charts, trend charts and gauges. The latter is particularly useful to report KPIs against targets.

Types of BI Systems

There are 3 main types of BI systems:
(1) Excel as a powerful tool for simpler situations
(2) Excel as the user interface, with some form of back-end database system
(3) Systems with their own user interface, including a back-end database

Back-end databases are of two fundamental types, with a number of variations:
(a) Multi-dimensional OLAP "cubes", termed MOLAP, which are ideal for many real-life analysis requirements once the dimensions are defined
(b) Relational databases, such as typically used for accounting systems, which are tuned to cater for multi-dimensional analysis, so are often termed ROLAP.

See update (6b) for what's important in selection of a BI system.

(Note: The term "OLAP" stands for "OnLine Analytical Processing". It is a throw back to 1993 when mainframes provided "OnLine Transactional Processing" after the era of purely batch processing. OnLine facilities are now the norm, but the term OLAP has stood the test of time to cover real-time analytical systems.)