Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is centered around performance measurement and management. To measure how well a business is doing we need to first establish key performance indicators (KPI). One way of doing this is by using a performance management framework such as a balanced scorecard which lays out the actions required to achieve specific organizational goals. A balanced scorecard focuses on four aspects: customer, financial, internal business processes, and learning and growth. Traditionally, businesses have often exclusively used financial performance as indicators for organizational growth, but this is misleading because non-financial factors such as customer satisfaction, employee morale, and product performance, all contribute to organizational growth and performance.

After establishing KPIs we quantify these measures and ensure that the data is correctly cleaned and profiled. Data profiling is used to determine if business rules and integrity constraints are being violated. It is vastly easier to perform new application integration and repurpose data sets when data is maintained at a high level of integrity. Poor quality data is worthless and analyzing poor data is a worthless effort. This cleaning process is necessary for proper extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) into data marts and data warehouses.

Data warehouses are designed and implemented to store all of our records. Analysts will access this data to create dashboards for quick and easy information consumption. Dashboards are visual representations of current and historical KPIs. A good dashboard is designed with a minimalist mindset and is presented in a way which information can be monitored at a glance. I want to stress how important it is to create well designed dashboards because immediate decisions that depend on real time dashboards can have dire consequences. Consider a hospital that uses poorly designed dashboards to monitor its patients or a businessman that uses poorly designed dashboards to monitor stocks.


Ram, Sudha. (February 2014). MIS 587 – Business Intelligence: Dashboard Design and its use for analysis. Lecture Conducted from University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. Accessed on February 16, 2014 from http://courses.eller.arizona.edu/mis/587/ram/Lecture8/

Ram, Sudha. (February 2014). MIS 587 – Business Intelligence: Data Quality Analysis. Lecture Conducted from University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. Accessed on February 14, 2014 from http://courses.eller.arizona.edu/mis/587/ram/Lecture7/

Ram, Sudha. (January 2014). MIS 587 – Business Intelligence: Balanced Scorecard. Lecture Conducted from University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. Accessed from http://courses.eller.arizona.edu/mis/587/ram/Lecture4/