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...down, it's somewhere out on the World Wide Web waiting to be found. Perhaps it's in a newsfeed or it can be found in a business database such as Dun & Bradstreet, but wherever it is, it is important for companies to be able to make use of and share with others in the enterprise.
This type of information-gathering falls within the broad category of software known as "business intelligence" tools, which allow employees to learn about a particular subject such as how the sales department is performing, what customers complain about most or what your closest competitor is doing. This article looks at the range of business intelligence software and provides some examples of how companies are using this information to run their businesses more efficiently.
THE BI LANDSCAPE
Since Business Intelligence (BI) spans a wide range of information types, it's not an easy area to nail down. For some, it means looking at pure business information such as sales data broken down by territory and pulled directly from a database. For others, it's less structured information such as internal PowerPoint presentations or other business documents or information found on the Web. Databases and data warehouses provide a large source of business information, but they are far from the only sources available to the enterprise. Actually, unstructured data found in places other than databases comprise the vast majority of data in the enterprise. "Today about 15 percent of the data are in a structured form and 85 percent of the data is in unstructured form. There is a big industry around that 15 percent," says Anant Jhingran, director of business intelligence at IBM.
According to Dan Vesset, research manager, analytics and data warehousing at IDC in Framingham, Massachusetts, that 3.5 percent is part of a huge industry IDC defines as business analytics (BA), which includes query and reporting tools, multi-dimensional analysis tools, datamining, and packaged data marts. Vesset says that BA accounted for 12 billion dollars worth of business in 2002. IDC sees BI as a piece of the broader business analytics market, which Vesset says accounted for 3.7 billion dollars of the total...
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