UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

UNIT

01
INTRODUCTION TO
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Business intelligence or BI is such a great

umbrella that encompasses various fields of
study, including data mining or data analytics
and business analytics. BI may also pertain to a
set of tools, technologies, software, systems,
infrastructures, and best practices used for the
collection, analysis, interpretation, visualization,
and presentation of data. You may find several
definitions about business intelligence over the
internet, books, and articles. There are so many
attempts trying to draw a line and differentiate
business intelligence versus business analytics,
but in the context of our discussion here, we will
treat business analytics as well as data analytics
as both subsets of BI. The succeeding sections
will discuss more about business analytics and
data mining.
This chapter focuses on what business
intelligence is all about.
Any strategy or process which uses technology
or tools to analyze business information may be
considered as business intelligence. But
technically, BI can be described as “a set of
techniques and tools for the acquisition and
transformation of raw data into meaningful and
useful information for business analysis
purposes” (Bentley, 2017). 1
 UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

PRETEST FOR UNIT 1

WHAT DO YOU ALREADY KNOW?

Name: __________________________________ Date: ____________________

Course & Section: ________________________ Result: __________________

Direction: Match the BI-related terms at Column A with its description at Column B
by placing the letter of your answer at the space preceeding the BI-related term.
Choices at Column B may be used more than once. Answers should be in capital
letter.

COLUMN A COLUMN B
A. finds meaningful knowledge or
1.______ business intelligence
patterns from data
B. use to identify probability of future
2.______ process mining
outcomes
3.______ master data management C. converts data in to visual types
4.______ unstructured data D. identify the best course of actions
E. uses technology, statistics &
5.______ data mining algorithms to gain insights about
business performance
6.______ reporting F. use to see what people are doing
G. analyze patterns of real-time data
7.______ business performance
streams to identify threats or
management
opportunities
H. appraisal of business conditions
8.______ business analytics
against competitors
9.______ predictive analytics I. analyze data for business purposes
10.______ data standardization J. use to improve business methods
K. process under collection of
11. ______ benchmarking
necessary data from valid sources
12. ______ structured data L. text-heavy data
13. ______ relational data base M. data profiling
N. data presented in rows and column
14. ______ event processing
format
15. ______ prescriptive analytics O. data cleansing

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 UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

PRETEST FOR UNIT 1

WHAT DO YOU ALREADY KNOW?

Name: __________________________________ Date: ____________________
Course & Section: ________________________ Result: __________________
Direction: Give your answer the following items based on your existing knowledge.
1. Think of one concrete scenario based on your experience, observations or
prior knowledge, that will prove the veracity of the statement “data are one of
the most important (or maybe the most important) asset of business
organizations today”. State your facts in 100 to150 words.

______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

2. Enumerate at least three words or phrases that you think are related to
“business intelligence”. Then, for each word, give a brief explanation (two to
three sentences) why do you associate those words with business
intelligence.
______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

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UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

LESSON 1:
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: ITS EVOLUTION AND
FUNCTIONS

OBJECTIVES:

At the end of this lesson, the student will be able to:

explain the concept and evolution of business intelligence.

analyze how business intelligence can improve strategic opportunities

of business organizations.

determine the common functions of business intelligence.

Duration: 1.5 hour

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 UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence or BI is such a great umbrella that encompasses various fields

of study, including data mining or data analytics and business analytics. BI may also
pertain to a set of tools, technologies, software, systems, infrastructures, and best
practices used for the collection, analysis, interpretation, visualization, and
presentation of data. You may find several definitions about business intelligence
over the internet, books, and articles. There are so many attempts trying to draw a
line and differentiate business intelligence versus business analytics, but in the
context of our discussion here, we will treat business analytics as well as data
analytics as both subsets of BI. The succeeding sections will discuss more about
business analytics and data mining.
This chapter focuses on what business intelligence is all about.
Any strategy or process which uses technology or tools to analyze business
information may be considered as business intelligence. But technically, BI can be
described as “a set of techniques and tools for the acquisition and
transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for
business analysis purposes” (Bentley, 2017).

How does Business Intelligence evolve?

The earliest known use of the term “Business Intelligence” can be traced back in the
‘Cyclopædia of Commercial and Business Anecdotes’ from 1865 when Richard Millar
Devens described the strategy done by the banker Sir Henry Furnese. Devens noted
that Furnese gained profit by receiving and acting upon information about his
environment, prior to his competitors. “Throughout Holland, Flanders, France, and
Germany, he maintained a complete and perfect train of business intelligence. The
news of the many battles fought was thus received first by him, and the fall of Namur
added to his profits, owing to his early receipt of the news.” (Devens, (1865), p. 210).

“The ability to collect and react accordingly based on the information retrieved,
an ability that Furnese excelled in, is today still at the very heart of BI” (Bentley,
2017).

In 1958, Hans Peter Luhn, one of the expert researchers of IBM also used the term
business intelligence on his article. He adopted the way how BI was defined by
Webster’s dictionary. For his point of view, BI is the competence to rationally
comprehends the knowledge that can be derived from present facts and its
correlation to other data, so that that knowledge can be used to achieved future
goals.

In 1960s, decision support systems or DSS started to be an essential tool in

business because of its capacity to provide insights that supports very specific
decisions. It was widely-used until the mid of 1980s. The continuous innovation in
DSS gave birth to the development of computer-aided models and algorithms which
were proven as very effective support in planning and decision-making process.
After these, at the late 1980s, came the emergence of data warehouses, intelligent
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 UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

information systems, online analytical processing, and business intelligence which

are all integral part of business processes today (Paradkar, 2014).

In 1989, a Gartner analyst, Howard Dresner introduced his own definition of

business intelligence. For him, business intelligence is an encompassing term that
includes “concepts and methods to improve business decision-making by using fact-
based support systems”. This definition is being uses extensively to describe
business intelligence since 1990s.

The milestone of BI and its major improvements from one point to another is shown
in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1. Sample Presentation of Database in OLAP system.

(Business performance management. (n.d.). Retrieved August 14, 2020, from
http://stratexone.com/consulting/business-performance-management/)

What Business Intelligence can do?

BI can improve an organization’s strategic business opportunities because it

has the capacity to:
1. Analyze structured and unstructured data;
2. Ease the interpretation of large volumes of data;
3. Help the organization in deriving meaningful insights; and
4. Provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations.
In general, BI can provide businesses with a competitive market advantage and
long-term stability.

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 UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

What Are the Common Functions of Business Intelligence?

BI helps the organization in carrying out some of their key business functions. As you
go along in your course, you will gain deeper understanding about each of those
functions, but for the meantime, they will just be defined in the simplest manner. The
purpose of this section is just to give you a preview on how they will be used in the
context of our discussion.
1. Reporting
This is one of the primary functions of business intelligence. It focuses on
converting and presenting data in different types of visualizations such
as tables, graphs, and charts. Converting data in graphical forms aims to
present information to end users in a more digestible and easy-to-
understand way. (Business Intelligence Reporting: A Complete Overview,
2020). Figure 1.2 is an example of BI reporting.

Figure 1.2. Common Forms of Visual Reporting in BI.

(Business Intelligence (BI) Reporting Cheat Sheet: BHW Blog. (2015, July 13). Retrieved August 14,
2020, from https://thebhwgroup.com/blog/ultimate-business-intelligence-reporting-cheat-sheet)

2. Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)

OLAP is a powerful BI technology which allows users to analyze database
information from several database systems at the same time (Easy OLAP
Definition, 2020).

By using OLAP servers or OLAP engines, company can easily and quickly
calculate and evaluate important business performance indicators (such as
net profits, sales revenue, etc.); plan and forecast future events; and
perform “what-if” analysis of large data sets (Khvoynitskaya, 2020).

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UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

Figure 1.3. Sample Presentation of Database in OLAP system.

(What are the differences between OLTP and OLAP Systems. (2020, April 13). Retrieved August 14,
2020, from https://www.gigxp.com/what-are-the-differences-between-oltp-and-olap-systems/)

3. Analytics
Analytics is a field in computer science uses data and math to solve
business problems, discover relationships in data, predict unknown
outcomes and automate decisions.  Google Analytics which can record the
activity of a website’s user from the moment he arrives until he leaves the
site and transforms it into different reports is an example of analytics
application (Antevenio, 2018). 

Figure 1.4. Sample Dashboard of Google Analytics Application.

(Google Analytics Dashboard Templates. (n.d.). Retrieved August 14, 2020, from
https://www.datapine.com/dashboard-examples-and-templates/google-analytics)

4. Data mining
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UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

It is the process of sorting or organizing large sets of data in order to

discover and identify meaningful patterns. Data mining provides tools to
discover relevant knowledge from data. It is also known as knowledge
discovery from data or KDD (Han, Pei & Kamber, 2011).

5. Process mining
Process Mining is a technical approach being done to check and
scrutinize the data form the event’s log of all tasks and
processes to see what people are doing (Hawkins, 2020). Process
mining allows the organization to analyze, monitor and improve their
existing busines processes (Robledo, 2018).

Figure 1.5. Process Mining as a Cross Between Data Mining and

Business Process Management.
Nogueira, F. (2020, June 05). Process Mining 101: Why should we care? Retrieved August 14,
2020, from https://laredoute.io/blog/process-mining-101-why-should-we-care/

6. Complex Event Processing (CEP)

CEP is a new technology / or approach used to capture, analyze and
search patterns in real time streams of data or events in order to
identify threats or opportunities in real time. Querying happens before
data are stored in data base. Common applications are stock market
trading, fraud detection and internet operations (Singh, n.d).

Figure 1.6. Typical Sequence of Processes in Complex Events

Processing.
Complex Event Processing: An Overview with Use Cases. (2020, January 06). Retrieved August
14, 2020, from https://hazelcast.com/glossary/complex-event-processing/

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UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

7. Business Performance Management (BPM)

Business performance management is a management process
implemented by business organizations to analyze and monitor their
existing methods, and to find ways how they could use their business
data to improve those methods (Jones, n.d.). BPM increases the
capacity of organization to make best strategic decisions quickly because it
allows them to track what is happening in the company in real time (Veyrat,
2017).
8. Benchmarking
Benchmarking is an activity or tool conducted in order to objectively and
honestly appraise the present condition of a business organization
vis-à-vis their competitors. It is also use to gauge the success of specific
programs, products or approaches present in the organization
(Benchmarking - Insights Should Improve Your Marketing, 2019).  

9. Text mining
Text mining is another field of study under data mining which aims to
discover meaningful and high-quality information or knowledge from
text data (Cai & Sun, 2009).

10. Predictive analytics

Predictive analytics is a type of data analytics that can be used to analyze
historical data in order to identify or predict the probability of future
outcomes. Various statistical algorithms and machine learning techniques
can be used to uncover patterns from data and to assess what will happen
next (Predictive Analytics: What it is and why it matters, n.d.).

11. Prescriptive analytics.

After predictions were made, prescriptive analytics can be used to identify
what is the best course of action to be done. The same with predictive
analytics, it also uses various statistical algorithms and machine learning
techniques, plus optimization technology which is needed to solve complex
decisions.

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 UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence
Multimedia Concepts

*Research Activity: Conduct a research and make a list of at least three

companies located in the Philippines that are now implementing the power of BI
to improve their strategies and gain business advantage.

No. Business Name Nature of Business

1
2
3
References:

**Think Big Activity. Among those common functions of BI, which do you think
is the most interesting for you and why? Share your answers using 150 to 200
words.

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UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

Weight Actual
No. Items
% Score
1. *The businesses listed are supported by research.
There are available references that supports the 30
reliability of the answers.

2. **The arguments presented shows deep

25
understanding about the topics.

3. **Statements are coherent and straight forward;

25
without fowery and highfalutin words.

4. **Expression of answers adheres to quality standard

20
of formal writing.

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UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

LESSON 2:
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: COMPONENTS AND
SUCCESS FACTORS

OBJECTIVES:
At the end of this lesson, the student will be able to:

differentiate the different components of business intelligence.

evaluate the fours success factors in BI implementation.

describe all of the essential steps for successful implementation of

business intelligence.
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 UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

Duration: 1 hour

What are the Key Components of Business Intelligence?

The main components of business intelligence are data warehouse, business

analytics and business performance management and user interface.

1. Data warehouse is an electronic repository of large amounts of data. It

holds centralized and consolidated data generated and collected from
multiple sources. Data warehouse is specially designed to optimized
analytics operations and BI activities (What is a Data Warehouse?, n.d.).

2. Business analytics is the subset of BI which focuses on extensive use

of statistician tools and methods, various prediction algorithms and
optimization technology in order to develop new insights and
understanding about business performance (Bentley, 2017).

3. Business performance management, as you already learned in the

previous section is a management process implemented by business
organizations to analyze and monitor their existing methods, and to find
ways how they could use their business data to improve those methods
(Jones, n.d.).

What are the Success Factors of Business Intelligence

Implementation?
According to Kimball (2008), there are three critical factors that affect the success or
failure of BI implementation in an organization. Therefore, the organizati0n’s

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 UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

readiness in terms of these factors should be properly assessed and evaluated first
before investing in a BI project:

1. The level of commitment and sponsorship of the project from senior

management.
According to Kimball, commitment and sponsorship of the project from
senior management is the most important criteria for assessment whether
the organization is already set to implement business intelligence, or must
still have to wait for a perfect time. If the project will not be supported by the
top-level management, it will probably fail no matter how good it is.
However, it is also said that even having the most sophisticated design of
BI project isn’t a guarantee to gain management support. Therefore, it is
very important that those persons who will initiate and will be involved in the
BI project has the capacity to influence and solicit support from the senior
managers. These people should have a clear understanding about the
organization’s visions and goals in order for them to justify how BI
implementation can contribute to the success of achieving those goals.

2. The level of business need for creating a BI implementation.

Another critical factor that must be assessed prior to the initiation if BI
project is the presence of a compelling business needs. It must be clearly
established that the organization really needs BI. Please take note that BI
implementation entails a very large amount of investment, thus, it should be
ensured that its benefits are greater that its drawbacks.

3. The amount and quality of business data available.

Before planning BI implementation, the organization should first conduct
data inventory or data profiling. This is to asses and to analyze if the
available data are enough and appropriate for the business intelligence
project. Bear in mind that even if the company is strongly motivated to
implement BI due to existing needs, and even if the top-level management
strongly supports it, BI implementation will still fail if there are no data to be
used.

What are the Essential Steps in Business Intelligence

Implementation?
Just the same with implementing various business strategies, successful
implementation of business intelligence must also follow some fundamental steps.
This section presents just the most essential processes, in some cases, BI
implementation may require carrying out of other steps as it deems necessary.
Please take note that these steps are not performed manually, these are carried out
using analytical software, statistical tools and algorithms.

1. Collect all necessary data from identified data source.

At this step, data standardization and master data management process
should be done.
Target: Source Data

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UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

Steps:
• Data Standardization: It is the process of making your data adheres
or conforms to a certain standard format. At the minimum, it includes
removing of nonessential symbols, punctuations or spaces; fixing
inconsistent format and rearranging or reordering of data (Linstedt &
Olschimke, 2015).

• Master Data Management: Master data refers to the consistent,

reliable and up-to-date centralized collection of the entire data about
major entities of a business organizations such as customers or
clients, suppliers, services, products, finances, vendors, employees,
contracts, locations and others which are core in business operations.
Master Data Management encompasses all the processes, technologies,
infrastructures, disciplines, and best practices to capture, integrate,
organize and synchronize the critical information at the master database
(Loshin, 2010).

2. Convert business data to information and present appropriately.

At this step, data cleansing and data profiling process should be done.
Target: Operational Data Store (ODS)
Steps:
• Data Cleansing: This process ensures that all data are ready for
analysis. This means that all data are already free from any inaccuracies
and inconsistencies. Redundant and unnecessary data are removed
while incomplete data as well as those that are improperly formatted may
be modified (Rafter, 2019). There are various techniques that can be
applied to treat incomplete or missing data values which you will learn in
the fundamentals of enterprise data management.

• Data Profiling: Data profiling is a formal process of analyzing data to

check if there are quality problems in the data. This process ascertains
the quality of both the metadata and the data itself. It also investigates
the flaws that might exists in the relationships and structures of data
(Sebastian-Coleman, 2012; Olson, 2010).

3. Execute queries and analyze data.

At this step, the completeness, integrity and consistency of data should be
checked.
Target: Data Warehouse
Steps:
• Completeness Check: It must be ensured that all necessary data from
all sources are loaded at the centralized repository (data warehouse).

• Integrity Check: It must be verified that there are valid relationship

rules that exists between and among the related tables in the databases.
This rules which protect the accuracy and consistency of data based on
existing relationships is known as referential integrity (McKnight, 2013).

• Overall Consistency Check: Before exploring data to find patterns

and insights, a final checking should be done to verify the consistency of
the consolidated data versus the data from various data sources.

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UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

4. Act on the collected data.

At this step, the uniqueness of indicators or predictors as well as the
accuracy of all formulas used should be checked.
Target: Reporting is the presentation of data usually in a summarized
and well-organized format. Visualization, or the use of
graphical / visual elements is a modern way of reporting.
Reporting presents data that are ready for analysis.
Steps:
• Checking if indicators are unique: There should be an established
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that should be used as evaluation
metrics to measure business success. These indicators should be
unique and should be the only indicators to be used by the entire
organizations. Otherwise, the summary and status of data that will be
reported might not be reliable, thus, could negatively affect the
decision-making process (Choosing KPI Metrics: Difference between
Good and Bad KPIs, n.d.).

• Checking if formulas are accurate: Mathematical and statistical

formulas are being used in making reports. It usually uses SQL
functions in summarizing and organizing the data. All those formulas
and functions should be one hundred percent precise and correct,
otherwise, data accuracy will be affected as well. Inaccurate data will
only lead to misleading and poor insights (Cotton, 2014).
Each of these processes will be discussed in details as you go along in this
course.

Think Big Activity. Give at least three specific reasons why do you think a BI
project would most probably fail if not supported by top management. 17
 UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

Reason 1:

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Reason 2:

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Reason 3:

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 UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

Research Activity. Go back to your answer in Research Activity 1, then find out
and describe at least three characteristics which are the common to those
companies or organizations that are now implementing business intelligence in
their operations.

Characteristic 1:

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Characteristic 2:

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Characteristic 3:

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 UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

Each of your answer will be graded based on the following criteria, then your final
score will be computed as the average of the six items.

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UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

Weight Actual
No. Items
% Score
1. The answer clearly exhibits higher order thinking skills. 20

2. The answer is parallel to the concepts that has been

20
discussed.

3. The answer shows good-decision making capacity. 20

4. Statements are coherent and straight forward; without

20
fowery and highfalutin words.

5. Expression of answers adheres to quality standard of

20
formal writing.

LESSON 3:
DATA AND ITS ROLE IN BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
21
 OBJECTIVES:
UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

At the end of this lesson, the student will be able to:

discriminate the different data structures used in business

intelligence.

give real-world examples of data which belong under different

structures.

classify different types of data based on its structure.

Duration: 1 hour

What are the Roles of Data in Business Intelligence?

Data is basically the bits and pieces of facts, information, numbers, statistics,
process and instructions that we generate, we gather and we use in our daily
operations. Data is everywhere. We are now living in a data-driven world. We can
say that data is the most essential element of decision-making process today. Data
capacitates business leaders to make powerful, timely and accurate decisions based
on facts, trends and statistics (Leonard, 2018).

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 UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

In fact, the term “datafication” is now a newly accepted concept which means turning
various aspects of our lives and practices in to quantifiable data (Mayer-Schonberger
& Cukier, 2013).
Data can be organized in certain ways. The term ‘data structure’ is used to describe
the way we store and organize data in its repository to grant easier and efficient
manner of accessing and modifying those data. Data structure contains data values
itself, the relationships that exists between and among those data, and the
operations that can be done on those data (Data Types: Structured vs. Unstructured
Data, 2019).
Technically, there are three common types of data structures, and you have to
understand each of this structure since this is an essential element in data
manipulation.
1. Structured Data
Structured data is information that has been organized and
transformed into a well-defined and formatted database with rows and
columns. They have relational keys and the raw data is mapped into
predesigned fields. Data can be read and extracted through SQL easily.
SQL relational databases, are the perfect example of structured data
(Naeem, 2020).

2. Unstructured Data
Unlike structured data, unstructured data has no defined and formatted
data model. This information is usually text-heavy such as those in
form of Word, PDF, Text and Media logs. Audio and video files are also
considered unstructured data. The nonuniformity and ambiguity of these
data made them too hard to store in a relational database, thus, an
alternative platform for storing and managing them is needed (Data Types:
Structured vs. Unstructured Data, 2019).
3. Semi-structured Data
As you may guess, semi-structured data is in between the first two
categories of data structures.
Semi-structured data is information which are not actually stored in relational
database but it contains some organizational properties such as semantic tags
(example: <title>” This is a sample XML tag” </title>) and metadata (data about
data). These organizational properties make semi-structured data more
manageable than structured data. Jason and XML files are examples of semi-
structured data (Naeem, 2020).

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UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

Think Big Activity. Imagine all the operations and transactions happening at
BulSU academic community. Enumerate at least ten sample data being
generated in the University, describe them, then identify them as either
structured, unstructured or semi structured. The first one was made as an
example.

No. Data Description Type

Discussion threads Information posted by BulSU unstructured
community in its web pages
and social network accounts.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

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 UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

Rubrics:
You will be given three points for each correctly classified and properly described
data.

LESSON 4:
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EMERGING TRENDS IN BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

OBJECTIVES:

At the end of this lesson, the student will be able to:

identify the emerging trends in the field of business intelligence.

evaluate the contributions of modern technology in the business

industry.

Duration: 1.5 hour

What are the Trends in Business Intelligence?

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 UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

The anticipated data that will be generated this year 2020 is 40 zettabytes or 40
trillion of gigabytes and it is expected to grow as high as 175 zettabytes by year 2025
(Haughey, 2019; Marr, n.d.).
You can visit https://www.internetlivestats.com/ or
https://www.worldometers.info/ to check the live statistics of data being generated
in the world real time.
As data continuously grow tremendously, its impact in making relevant and timely
decision in various industry is becoming more and more imperative. And that makes
business intelligence one of the most in demand platform today, there seems to be
an uninterrupted advancement in BI and this might be the constant trend.
Haughey (2019), a marketing expert and the present managing editor of MarTech
Gazette, published in one of his articles the seven trends that is predicted to
proliferate in the field of business intelligence for 2020 and beyond.
1. Growing Technologies for Data Discovery
Gone are the days when the only option available to collect data is to
conduct face-to-face surveys and interviews. Today, we are most familiar
with data collection through email subscriptions where the subscriber or
internet user grant permission to a particular brand or organization to
regularly send him or her some updates about their products usually in form
of newsletters. However, as data become more and more universal and
abounding, and is now a very powerful driving force not just in business but
in many other sectors as well, the technologies that capture and analyze
data are now emerging like a snowball (Freedman, 2020).
Take a look at the next three figures below (Figure 1.7 to Figure 1.9)
containing Big Data Landscape and take note of the increasing presence of
technologies available for processing data from 2012 to 2019.

Figure 1.7. Big Data Landscape 2012.

Feinleib, D. (2014, June 27). The Big Data Landscape. Retrieved August 18, 2020, from
Big Datahttps://www.forbes.com/sites/davefeinleib/2012/06/19/the-big-data-landscape/
Landscape concept includes Companies, products, and
technologies which are active participant in data generation, collection,
analysis, management and other data-related processes (Feinleib, 2014).

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UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

Figure 1.8. Big Data and AI Landscape 2016.

Turck, M. (2017, December 20). Is Big Data Still a Thing? (The 2016 Big Data Landscape).
Retrieved August 18, 2020, from https://mattturck.com/big-data-landscape/

Figure 1.9. Big Data and AI Landscape 2019.

Turck, M. (2019, July 17). A Turbulent Year: The 2019 Data & AI Landscape. Retrieved August 18,
2020, from https://mattturck.com/data2019/

2. Growing Numbers of BI Users

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UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

The power of business intelligence to provide effective business solutions is

now generally accepted and proven to be impressive in providing
meaningful insights. Because of this, more and more organizations are now
joining the arcade of BI users.

3. Intensive Use of Predictive Business Analytics

Consumers nowadays have unlimited access to product information and
can use multiple devices in exploring the internet. A customer can make
several interactions or touchpoints about a certain product before deciding
to make a purchase. A touchpoint is defined as any point of contact or
interaction between a product and a customer that affects the latter’s
purchasing decision. Interaction can be physical or via other channels such
as email, website and other platforms (Patterson, 2018).

That makes analyzing customer’s behavior more complex and difficult.

Therefore, companies felt compelled to invest in technologies that can help
them predict future events or outcomes based on existing data such as the
customers possibility to purchase a product based on the history of its
touchpoints. That ability to forecast future business outcomes is what
predictive analytics does.

Figure 1.10. Sample Customer’s Touchpoints.

Haughey, C. (2019, December 21). 7 Business Intelligence Trends You Can't Ignore in 2020.
Retrieved August 17, 2020, from https://www.singlegrain.com/digital-marketing/business-
intelligence-trends-2020/

4. Advancement in Natural Language Processing

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UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

Natural Language Processing or NLP is an integral part of artificial

intelligence that explores the use of computer machines in understanding,
interpreting and manipulating natural language, i.e., human language, for
valuable purposes (Deng & Liu, 2018). Machine translation of text form one
language to another and speech recognition such as the ability of Siri,
Cortana, Google Assistant and Alexa to recognize your voice might be the
most familiar examples of NLP to you. But today, NLP can do a lot of
intelligent functions far beyond machine translations and speech
recognition.

NLP can be used to analyze customers’ opinion and sentiments (Anurag,

2020).

Machine learning which is such a complex topic to be discussed at this

point actually uses NLP in performing its main purpose – “to learn future
actions and make decisions with minimal human intervention, based on
historical data” (Machine Learning: What it is and why it matters, n.d.).

Because of the excellent performance of NLP, most of the business

intelligence software today already integrates NLP as one of their primary
features. Domo, Microstrategy, Tableau and Microsoft Power BI are among
the BI platforms with embedded NLP.

5. Integration of Augmented Analytics in Business Intelligence

Augmented analytics is a very new concept coined by Gartner on 2017 but
is expected to be a prevalent driver in the selection of analytics and
business intelligence platforms by 2021 (Reghimi, 2020).

“Augmented analytics uses machine learning/ artificial intelligence (ML/AI)

techniques to automate data preparation, insight discovery and sharing. It
also automates data science and ML model development, management
and deployment” (Augmented Analytics: The Future of Business
Intelligence, n.d.). In other words, analysis of data to discover valuable
information and meaningful insights can already be done with less or
without involvement of data analysts and scientists (Marr, n.d). And that will
make BI platforms easier to use, even people without heavy background on
statistics and computer science can efficiently use BI software (Haughey,
2019).

6. Extensive Use of Mobile BI

Mobile BI allows remote workers to access BI-related data via mobile
platform. Mobile users can access business-critical data anytime, anywhere
when needed (Fang, Azmi, Yahya, Sarkan, Sjarif & Chuprat, 2018). Data
ca be accessed real time, so users can act upon on the problems or
scenarios promptly.

Mobile BI might be a very essential part of business intelligence since most

of the organization’s work force today owns smart devices. Its market is
expected to hit 20Billion dollar by 2024 (Haughey, 2019).

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UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

Figure 1.11. Emerging Augmented Analytics Workflow.

Augmented Analytics: The Future of Business Intelligence. (n.d.). Retrieved August 18, 2020, from
https://www.sisense.com/whitepapers/augmented-analytics-the-future-of-business-intelligence/

Figure 1.12. Example of Mobile BI Dashboard

Kempe, S. (2013, November 20). Mobile Business Intelligence. Retrieved August 18, 2020, from
https://www.dataversity.net/mobile-business-intelligence/

7. Data Governance Will Be a Top Priority

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UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

Data governance is a management framework that ensures that the

organization has sufficient, consistent and reliable data that can be used for
deriving business-related information. It encompasses all the processes
involved in the management of all resources related to the storage and
security of corporate data. It also ensures that all transactions carried out in
all business-related data are accounted to guarantee effective data
management (Westland, 2020; Haughey, 2019).

Figure 1.13. Sample Data governance Framework

What is Data Governance: Imperva. (2019, December 30). Retrieved August 18, 2020, from
https://www.imperva.com/learn/data-security/data-governance/

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UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence
Multimedia Concepts

*Think Big Activity. It is said that data is very important in

business, in fact, data is said to be the “new oil” or even the “new
currency” today, but it’s useless unless you can derive meaningful insights
from it. Go back to your answer in Think Big Activity at Lesson3 and
explain how those data that you identified can give competitive advantage
to BulSU.

Answers:

___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________

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 UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

**Research Activity. Research at least three examples of advanced

applications of NLP today. Briefly discuss each application.

Application No.1:____________________________________________________
Description:
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
Application No.2:____________________________________________________
Description:
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
Application No.3:____________________________________________________
Description:
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________

34
 UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

Rubrics:

Weight Actual
No. Items
% Score
1. *The answer justifies the importance of data in the
successful operations of business organizations in 20
general.

2. *The answer clearly describes how BulSU can turn

those identified data into assests which can give 20
competitive advantage.

3. **The NLP applications presented are recent and

20
relevant in the field of business intelligence.

3. **Each application is described coherently. 20

4. Expression of answers adheres to quality standard of

20
formal writing.

POST-TEST
bore FORaliqua.sed
et dolore magna UNIT 1 do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore
magna aliqua.

HOW MUCH HAVE YOU LEARNED?

35
 UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

Name: _______________________________ Date: _______________________

Course & Section: _____________________ Result: _____________________

Direction: Match the BI-related terms at Column A with its description at Column B
by placing the letter of your answer at the space preceeding the BI-related term.
Choices at Column B may be used more than once. Answers should be in capital
letter.

COLUMN A COLUMN B
A. finds meaningful knowledge or
1.______ business intelligence
patterns from data
B. use to identify probability of future
2.______ process mining
outcomes
3.______ master data management C. converts data in to visual types
4.______ unstructured data D. identify the best course of actions
E. uses technology, statistics &
5.______ data mining algorithms to gain insights about
business performance
6.______ reporting F. use to see what people are doing
G. analyze patterns of real-time data
7.______ business performance
streams to identify threats or
management
opportunities
H. appraisal of business conditions
8.______ business analytics
against competitors
9.______ predictive analytics I. analyze data for business purposes
10.______ data standardization J. use to improve business methods
K. process under collection of
11. ______ benchmarking
necessary data from valid sources
12. ______ structured data L. text-heavy data
13. ______ relational data base M. data profiling
N. data presented in rows and column
14. ______ event processing
format
15. ______ prescriptive analytics O. data cleansing

PRE-TEST and POST - TEST FOR UNIT 1

ANSWER KEY
36
UNIT 1: Introduction to Business Intelligence

No. PRE-TEST POST - TEST

1. I I
2. F F
3. K K
4. L L
5. A A
6. C C
7. J J
8. E E
9. B B
10. K K
11. H H
12. N N
13. N N
14. G G
15. D D

37