Business Intelligence: Dashboards and Applications
The terms business intelligence (BI) and information applications are often used interchangeably to refer to the broad category of technologies for consolidating, reporting, and analyzing business data to help business users make better business decisions. BI or information applications cover the spectrum of ETL tools (extraction-transformation and loading), the activities of decision support systems, queries and reports, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical and predictive analysis, in-memory data manipulation and performance management tools. and applications.
Business intelligence applications can be internal, including applications such as customer intelligence, spending and budgeting, human resources, or outside the firewall, which are self-service applications designed for customers and partners or vendors. Over the past decade, BI applications have helped organizations consolidate and analyze the mission-critical information that is an integral part of a company’s operations and have become the central source of truth driven by customer demand. users.
Innovative companies recognize the limitations of the traditional business BI model and made a strategic commitment to open source for the future of their product line. Open source technology was the key to responding to three important trends that were emerging in the BI industry due to user demands:
• More sophisticated interactive graphics for viewing information online: Google, Amazon, and Yahoo were changing user expectations of how information looks on the Web and now, with the advent of Web 2.0 and Rich Internet Applications , the expectation of that information was from Be very interactive.
• Metaphor of web design: The web design process was creating a new standard for how to design and develop documents. This new community of developers needed an alternative to traditional in-band report writers.
• Open Source: Open source was emerging as a method of developing, distributing and licensing software to achieve innovation, accelerated development cycle, and market-demanded feature set created due to the involvement of a developer community. .
These products add Flash visualizations in applications developed using open source BIRT reports, enhance the user experience when viewing and interacting with BIRT web pages, provide special-purpose data access approaches, add programming, security, document management, and finally , reliability, performance, and scalability features for enterprise deployments.