If you’ve ended up here hoping to read about sexuality, I’m sorry for misleading you. This is a little spot for me to publish a presentation I have given a few times, which is an introduction into Business Intelligence (BI).
More and more often, I’m hearing people talking about data as an asset, and one with tremendous potential. But without the right treatment, data is just a large amount of wasted disk space.
At the very simplest level, Business Intelligence is the field of IT which works closely with business stakeholders to identify the questions which are most critical to understanding the processes and performance of the organisation, and supplying the right people with the answers to those questions in the most efficient manner. As the BI maturity increases, more advanced questions can be answered and more complex answers given. From a simple plain text report, or an emailed bank statement, to an interactive dashboard or data mining model with complex statistical algorithms, the goal of BI is to provide the best answers to help business make good, information driven decisions.
“Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius-and a lot of courage-to move in the opposite direction.” – Albert Einstein
You can download the slide deck here.
I will be doing this talk at SQL Saturday LA in June, and submitting it as an abstract to PASS Summit for later in the year.