Defining Business Intelligence (BI)

• Components of a BI program
• Mapping the business intelligence process
• Identifying the business needs for BI
• New BI taxonomy
• BI-specific management issues
• Driving business agility and efficiency

Building a Road Map

Applying BI to solve business problems

• Assessing the business problem
• Distinguishing major components of a BI process
• Focusing on pertinent information using the BI process
• Stating desired outcome for a given situation
• Overcoming common BI challenges

Iterating the BI metamodel

• Starting BI with simple processes
• Proposing secondary uses for transactional data
• Scaling the BI process to fit your organizational needs
• Enabling repeatable and successful BI processes

Discovering possibilities

• Listing the major components of a BI system
• Investigating the business advantages of strategic vs. tactical applications of BI
• Reviewing successful systems
• Selecting capabilities for your organization
• Identifying critical and variable attributes of a BI program

Connecting processes

• Realizing the desired outcome from a specific organizational situation
• Targeting the process to achieve the desired outcome
• Deriving actions and decisions from the desired outcome

Designing and Planning BI Processes

Defining business requirements

• Generating an initial data warehouse matrix
• Aggregating business processes
• Selecting dimensions

Modeling the dimensional business process

• Navigating facts and dimensions
• Strengthening relationships
• Creating the appropriate schema
• Traversing hierarchies

Constructing the data warehouse

• Extracting data from multiple sources
• Transforming data during migration
• Loading data into a data warehouse

Implementing and Fine-Tuning the BI Solution

Evaluating business analytic tools

• Selecting criteria for business analytics
• Exploring online analytic processing (OLAP) tools
• Slicing and dicing your data using multidimensional cubes
• Examining the characteristics of a data mine
• Reviewing data mining tools

Leveraging performance measurement tools

• Observing information using dashboards
• Assessing the current state of your business with key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Communicating to stakeholders through scorecards

Organizing a Business Intelligence Consistency Center (BICC)

• Promoting expertise within your organization
• Producing a BICC functional checklist
• Clarifying the roles of the BICC
• Organizing the BICC

Putting BI to Work for You

• Applying the BI process across the organization
• Making predictive analytics work for your bottom line
• Blending BI process into daily management activities