Business Intelligence (BI) is the means to turn the mountains of data already held within your organisation into meaningful information. Armed with this information about your customers you are then better able to provide new and enhanced products and services to meet their needs more effectively.

BI covers a whole host of technologies from the data warehouse (the bedrock of any BI system), the data extraction and cleaning tools, through to the tools used to exploit the data.

Calling a Spade, a Spade?

Since 1999 the term Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has also been applied to these types of systems. BI & CRM are really the latest name for ideas that have been around for a couple of decades: Enterprise databases, Management/Executive Information Systems, Decision Support Systems.

The other related terms are:

• data mart: originally a subset of a data warehouse, with data targeted at a specific department, e.g. Marketing or Finance
• operational data store: a slightly contradictory term, referring to a data warehouse that has transactional contents as well as historical data

In many respects, these different terms are being made redundant, as the data warehouse becomes an integrated part of the corporate systems. Whilst a warehouse is rarely as sensitive to downtime as your front office, call-centre or web site systems, it has, nonetheless, become a mission-critical component without which the business is starved of vital information.

What is important is not the name technology that allows you to serve your customers, and therefore your organisation and its stakeholders, better.

Click-Stream Analysis

Recently there's been an increasing interest in technologies that allow the study of how visitors interact with web sites, commonly called "click-stream" analysis (in today's internet world this is sometimes called "e-CRM"). Analyzing web activity provides an understanding of customer behaviour and interest and gives a dynamic picutre of how these may change.

Click stream analysis started by processing the log files generated by the web servers to identify which pages have been requested. However, this technique has many limitations, not least the very loose relaltionship between page views and users. Web sites that are driven by customer-centric databases are rapidly superseding it. To see more about how to build a database-powered web site see www.veriton.net.

Further Reading

How do you build a Business Intelligence system?