BI Theory Topics for exam

1. BI definitions

Business Intelligence (BI) refers to skills, processes, technologies, applications and practices used
to support decision making.

Systems that provide directed background data and reporting tools to support and improve the
decision-making process.

A popularized, umbrella term used to describe a set of concepts and methods to improve business
decision making by using fact-based support systems. The term is sometimes used interchangeably
with briefing books and executive information systems.

Business Intelligence is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing,
analysing, and providing access to data to help clients make better business decisions.

A system that collects, integrates, analyses and presents business information to support better
business decision making.

Business Intelligence is an environment in which business users receive information that is

reliable, secure, consistent, understandable, easily manipulated and timely, facilitating more
informed decision making

2. Essential BI competencies and skills with a BICC

Data Storage & Management: Data Warehousing, Ad-Hoc Analysis, Data Quality, Data Mining
Information Delivery: Dashboards, Collaboration/Search, Managed Reporting, Vizualization,
Sorecards
Query, Reporting & Analysis: Ad-Hoc Analysis, Production Reporting, OLAP Analysis
Examples of Business skills include understanding
of line-of-business (LOB) needs, and ability to help
business managers set and balance priorities by
analyzing consequences of choices and creating
business cases.
Examples of IT skills include ability to understand
the business intelligence infrastructure implications
of business and analytic requirements, and deep
understanding of how to access and manage data
required to support business and analysis
requirements.
Examples of Analytical skills include fluency with
key analytic applications and researching business
problems and creating models that help analyze
these business problems.

3. Business scorecards purpose, , benefits to the executive, contents

Purpose

A scorecard should give an executive a visual representation of the health of an organization in a

single glance

The scorecard is of sufficiently high level to represent major business operations and their goals

The data in a scorecard should be as recent as possible to make them more actionable

Benefits to the Executive

In a single glance, the executive can see a wide swath of the business (finance, manufacturing,
sales, marketing, and more)

Immediate value is gained without the need for the executive to perform analysis

Executives see not just actual values, but comparisons to plans or prior results

The Contents of a Scorecard

Scorecards usually contain some or all of the following elements:

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

KPI actual values compared to historical values (for trend analysis)

KPI actual values compared to a forecast or budget amount

Rankings of different departments, locations, products, and so forth

4. Business dashboards purpose, benefits to the executive, contents

Purpose

A dashboard is designed to allow decision makers to see a variety of data that affects their
divisions or departments

This data may be in the form of scorecards, charts, tables, and so forth

The dashboard is generally customized for each user

More targeted and detailed than a scorecard

Benefits to Decision Makers

Decision makers see a variety of information targeted to their department

o This allows decision makers to focus only on the items over which they have control

Information is more detailed than that of a scorecard

The tools in the dashboard often have better analytic capabilities than a scorecard

Contents

A Dashboard generally contains a variety of different views of data

The data is generally KPIs and shows trends, breakdowns, and comparisons against a forecast or
historical data

The dashboard often consists of charts and tables, and may include scorecard elements as well

5. Business reports and Custom Application Integration purpose, benefits to the

executive, contents
Purpose
Reports allow a much broader audience to benefit from the data in a BI solution
Reports may be static, requiring no training
o Reports may also allow a limited amount of interactivity
o Reports can be presented in a variety of formats, allowing for easier distribution
The Purpose of Custom Application Integration
An application used by line workers may include business intelligence without the worker
realizing what is happening
o A sales clerk may get a list of targeted recommendations to make based on what the
customer is buying
o A loan officer may be presented with the level of risk associated with granting a loan to a
particular customer
The Contents of Custom Application Integration
Custom applications may include predictive output from data mining models
Custom applications can show history and trends for the current customer, supplier, and so forth
Custom applications may allow easy ways for users to explore the data for relationships

6. The Benefits of BI

Time savings

Cost savings

Single version of truth

Faster, more accurate reporting

Improved strategies and plans

Improved decision making

Improved tactical decisions

Improved customer service

More efficient processes

Increased revenue

7. Best practices for successful BI

1. Find a high level Executive sponsor

An executive sponsor is someone who can understand the value of business intelligence, champion
and promote the project across the organization. BI case studies report that a high level executive
support is one of the key reasons for success.
The role of an executive sponsor includes:
Championing the program
Influence and gain trust of other c-level executives
Approve the budget required for the project
2. Business Intelligence Competency Centre (BICC)
In many ways the critical competency for success with BI is having the right people and program
management practices in place. Having a broad-based Business Intelligence Competency Centre
(BICC) is a crucial factor. The role of BICC is to
Develop the overall strategic plan and priorities
Define and implement the requirements (including data quality and governance)
Help the organization to interpret and apply the insight to make business decisions
Depending on the type of organization, the BICC will report to a high-level business executive,
such as the CFO, COO, CIO or chief strategy officer. Some potential BICC (or Center of
Excellence) organization charts are below. Actual organization charts can vary significantly from
the simplified options presented.
3. Alignment between IT and Business
One of the critical factors for BI success is the alignment between IT and Business. It is important
to identify the intent and expectation from the BI initiative. The BI objectives should be closely
aligned with the business objectives and business strategy. Understanding the information needs
across the organization as well as by stakeholder groups is a key to success. Ideally, this will
include prioritization of needs both within and across stakeholder groups. The activity of selecting
priorities must be transparent and agreed on by Business Intelligence leaders and its stakeholders
and where possible, tied to the impact on corporate objectives.
4. Define Architecture and Standards
Define architecture for different components of BI infrastructure. Develop and maintain standards
regarding methodologies, definitions, processes, tools and technologies required to implement BI.
5. Develop roadmap, measure progress and success
It is important to develop a roadmap, measure progress and manage key decision points within the
program timeline. Develop metrics that will measure both the implementation and ongoing success
of BI.

8. BICC definitions

BICC is a cross-functional team, with specific tasks, roles responsibilities and processes for supporting
and promoting the effective use of BI across the organization.
BICC act as a center of expertise of BI and drive and support it use throughout the organization.
It has employees from the organization itself, although some roles can be outsourced. Based on this,
makes it available to business users at different levels and providing advice and support for all BIrelated questions, including assistance with the interpretation of information.
A BICC enables the organization to coordinate and complement existing efforts in the area of BI, while
reducing redundancy and increasing effectiveness. The centralization of these efforts ensures that
information and best practices are communicated and shared through the entire organization so that
everyone can benefit from successes.
BICC can be defined as a team of dedicated Business and IT specialists accountable for defining,
owning and managing the execution of the companys BI strategy and agenda.
While many leaders, stakeholders, contributors, managers, analysts, developers and user communities
participate in BI efforts in one way or another, a BICC serves as the catalyst and glue that creates,
promotes ,and holds together the overall BI operating model (Hitachi).
The CC develops the overall strategic plan and priorities for BI, defines the requirements and helps the
organization to interpret and apply the insight to business decisions (Hostmann).

The BICC should be a cross-organizational group that encompasses of people skilled in Business, IT
and Analytics.

9. Organizational model for BICC

Depending on the type of organization, the BICC will report to a high-level business executive,
such as the CFO, COO, CIO or chief strategy officer. Some potential BICC (or Center of
Excellence) organization charts are below. Actual organization charts can vary significantly from
the simplified options presented.

10.Functional areas in the BICC

Business Intelligence Program

The Business Intelligence Program function is the cornerstone of the BICC. It oversees and
coordinates all of the activities of the BICC and is the interface to the business units. Specifically,
the Business Intelligence Program function is involved in defining the Business Intelligence (BI)
objectives and strategy and tracks the success of that strategy over time. It ensures that the BI

strategy is executed, enables the business needs and that it supports the organization's overall
strategy.

Here, business users can get advice and coaching on how to use BI analyses and interpret the
results. The BI Program function also acts as the project office for all BI-related projects. It keeps
the organization abreast of new BI trends and technologies and explains how the organization
could benefit from them.

Furthermore, it is responsible for sharing BI knowledge throughout the organization.

Data Stewardship

The data stewardship function takes care of administering technical metadata and ensures its
alignment with business metadata. It is responsible for data standards, data quality, and data
governance

Support

The support function acts as the second-level support for BI problems. The assumption is that firstlevel support would be handled by the general service desk in the organization. The BICC support
function clarifies the BI problem messages, analyses the problem in detail, and gets back to the
user with the solution. In case the problem cannot be solved in-house, it will be passed to the
software vendor.

BI Delivery

The BI delivery function takes care of the applications for delivery and distribution of information
throughout the entire life cycle of the applications, including their design, development, testing,
and maintenance. These applications comprise reporting, business logic, and portals-that is, all
applications that transform the data residing in data warehouses or other BI storage areas into BI.

Data Acquisition

The data acquisition function handles the back-end-related BI activities. It takes care of data
integration and data store development, testing, and maintenance as well as the overall warehouse
design and integration projects.

Advanced Analytics

The advanced analytics function specializes in statistical analysis, modeling optimization

techniques, forecasting, and data mining. It handles complex analytical requests coming from the
business units.

Training

The training function trains business users in BI concepts and BI applications. It coaches them by
providing answers to their BI questions. It also takes care of any BI product-specific training and
certifications for project teams or business users.

Vendor Contracts Management

The vendor contracts management function handles all the license- and contract-related issues,
such as user licenses, software distribution, and service-level agreements with BI vendors and
product evaluations.

This function also acts as an interface to the organization's purchasing and legal departments.

11.Insourcing or Outsourcing BICC

Insourcing is all about control. It is used for following reasons:

Greater control over resources
Greater ability to control intellectual property
Increased visibility of accountability within the organization
Have confidence in your team to do meticulous planning and flawless execution.
Outsourcing to a vendor or a cloud platform is all about leverage; it is used for the following
reasons:
Access to resources and expertise quickly without a long recruiting cycle
Different cost structure and quicker startup
Vendor brings a broad-based perspective that if leveraged properly can be quite in-valuable
The best option is usually a hybrid model a mix of insourced and outsourced. The metrics you
typically want to optimize in any structure are Cost, Quality, Productivity, Innovation and Speedto-market.
In a hybrid model think through which resources are in-house and which resources can be
outsourced - Executive Sponsors, BI Leadership, Program and Project managers, Business
Analysts, Architects, Administrators, Developers, Data Stewards, Data Modelers, and Data
warehouse analysts.
Also with data being governed by various Data Privacy laws (ex. International and U.S Data
Privacy Legislation) think about which enterprise-wide data integration initiatives can be in-house
vs. outsourced data warehousing, data migration, data consolidation, data synchronization, and
data quality, as well as the establishment of data hubs, data services, cross-enterprise data
exchange, and integration competency centers.
Think through different types of data and which laws impact each by geography personal privacy
data, client data, internal process data, and B2B data.

12.OLAP definitions

An OLAP cubeis an array of data understood in terms of its 0 or more dimensions. OLAP is an
acronym for online analytical processing. OLAP is a computer-based technique for analyzing
business data in the search for business intelligence.

An online analytical processing cube (OLAP cube) is a multidimensional array of data that
serves as a database optimized for OLAP applications and data warehousing. It is a way of storing
relevant data in a multidimensional form to make it appear more logical when used to generate
reports and facilitate more efficient analytics.

An OLAP cube is a multidimensional database that is optimized for data warehouse and online
analytical processing (OLAP) applications.
An OLAP cube is a method of storing data in a multidimensional form, generally for reporting
purposes. In OLAP cubes, data (measures) are categorized by dimensions. OLAP cubes are often
pre-summarized across dimensions to drastically improve query time over relational databases.
The query language used to interact and perform tasks with OLAP cubes is multidimensional
expressions (MDX). The MDX language was originally developed by Microsoft in the late 1990s,
and has been adopted by many other vendors of multidimensional databases.
Although it stores data like a traditional database does, an OLAP cube is structured very
differently. Databases, historically, are designed according to the requirements of the IT systems
that use them. OLAP cubes, however, are used by business users for advanced analytics. Thus,
OLAP cubes are designed using business logic and understanding. They are optimized for
analytical purposes, so that they can report on millions of records at a time.

Stands for "Online Analytical Processing." OLAP allows users to analyze database information
from multiple database systems at one time. While relational databases are considered to be twodimensional, OLAP data is multidimensional, meaning the information can be compared in many
different ways. For example, a company might compare their computer sales in June with sales in
July, then compare those results with the sales from another location, which might be stored in a
different database.

13.Diagram of the OLAP Dimensional

Model

In OLAP the cube is the database

structure that is queried on and to get a
handle on how this works below is a simple
3 dimensional cube

14.OLAP operations slicing and

dicing

When you slice data, you decrease cube dimensionality by setting one or more dimensions to a
specific value. For example, if you set one of the sales cube dimensions to a value, such as
store='EverMore', this results in the set of events associated with the items sold in the EverMore
store.

According to the cube metaphor, this is simply a plane of cellsthat is, a data slice that can be
easily displayed in spreadsheets.
In the store chain example given earlier, approximately 10(5th) events still appear in your result. If
you set two dimensions to a value, such as store='EverMore' and date='4/5/2008', this will result in
all the different items sold in the EverMore store on April 5 (approximately 100 events).
Graphically speaking, this information is stored at the intersection of two perpendicular planes
resulting in a line. If you set all the dimensions to a particular value, you will define just one event
that corresponds to a point in the three-dimensional space of sales.
Dicing is a generalization of slicing. It poses some constraints on dimensional attributes to scale
down the size of a cube. For example, you can select only the daily sales of the food items in April
2008 in Florida. In this way, if five stores are located in Florida and 50 food products are sold, the
number of events to examine changes to 5 50 30 = 7500.
Finally, a projection can be referred to as a choice to keep just one subgroup of measures for every
event and reject other measures.
Slice:A slice is a subset of a multi-dimensional array corresponding to a single value for one or
more members of the dimensions not in the subset.
Slice is any two-dimensional slice of the data cube. You slice a data cube to filter information. For
example, the figure below shows a data cube with following dimensions: Retailer, Date and
Product.
If you are interested only in the data for a specific retailer you can slice off a single (two
dimensional) layer. In our example the slice contains information on date and product for
department stores.
Dice:The dice operation is a slice on more than two dimensions of a data cube (or more than two
consecutive slices).
Dice is the "rotation" of the cube to reveal another, different slice of data.
For exploring data from various perspectives, you can dice a data cube by exchanging the
dimension for other dimensions. For example, after exploring the data by date and product for a
specific retailer (orange slice on the left cube), you want to get deeper information on date and
retailer for a specific product.

15.OLAP operations drill down, roll up, pivot

Drill Down/Up:Drilling down or up is a specific analytical technique whereby the user navigates
among levels of data ranging from the most summarized (up) to the most detailed (down).
Drill Down is the exploration of data to subsequent levels of more detail along a dimension.
For example, the dimension "Retailer" can be drilled-down to specific retailers, the dimension
"Date" can be drilled-down to months, and the dimension "Product" finally, can be explored in
more detail by single products.

Roll-up:(Aggregate, Consolidate) A roll-up involves computing all of the data relationships for
one or more dimensions. To do this, a computational relationship or formula might be defined.
Roll-up is the aggregation of data to subsequent levels of summary, along a dimension. This
implies that dimensions are typically hierarchical in nature based on parent/child relationships
between dimension values.

Pivot: This operation is also called rotate operation. It rotates the data in order to provide an
alternative presentation of data the report or page display takes a different dimensional
orientation.

16.OLAP vs OLTP

Online transaction processing systems (OLTP)

Systems that handle a companys routine ongoing business

Online analytic processing (OLAP)

An information system that enables the user, while at a PC, to query the system, conduct an
analysis, and so on. The result is generated in seconds

OLAP allows business users to slice and dice data at will. Normally data in an organization is
distributed in multiple data sources and are incompatible with each other. A retail example: Pointof-sales data and sales made via call-center or the Web are stored in different location and formats.
It would a time consuming process for an executive to obtain OLAP reports such as - What are the
most popular products purchased by customers between the ages 15 to 30?

Part of the OLAP implementation process involves extracting data from the various data
repositories and making them compatible. Making data compatible involves ensuring that the
meaning of the data in one repository matches all other repositories. An example of incompatible
data: Customer ages can be stored as birth date for purchases made over the web and stored as age
categories (i.e. between 15 and 30) for in store sales.

It is not always necessary to create a data warehouse for OLAP analysis. Data stored by
operational systems, such as point-of-sales, are in types of databases called OLTPs. OLTP, Online
Transaction Process, databases do not have any difference from a structural perspective from any
other databases. The main difference, and only, difference is the way in which data is stored.

Examples of OLTPs can include ERP, CRM, SCM, Point-of-Sale applications, Call Center.

OLTPs are designed for optimal transaction speed. When a consumer makes a purchase online,
they expect the transactions to occur instantaneously. With a database design, call data modeling,
optimized for transactions the record 'Consumer name, Address, Telephone, Order Number, Order
Name, Price, Payment Method' is created quickly on the database and the results can be recalled by
managers equally quickly if needed.