According to Wikipedia – BI (Business Intelligence) is defined as follows;
“Business intelligence (BI) is a set of theories, methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information. BI can handle large amounts of information to help identify and develop new opportunities. Making use of new opportunities and implementing an effective strategy can provide a competitive market advantage and long-term stability.[1]
BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics.
Though the term business intelligence is sometimes a synonym for competitive intelligence (because they both support decision making), BI uses technologies, processes, and applications to analyze mostly internal, structured data and business processes while competitive intelligence gathers, analyzes and disseminates information with a topical focus on company competitors. If understood broadly, business intelligence can include the subset of competitive intelligence.[2]”
This sounds pretty useful right? So why do I mention it?
We have two great offerings in this space, both of which cover the integration of SQL Server® BI technologies and SharePoint® Server, allowing you to use one central location for placing all of your enterprise-wide BI content and tools.
What can you expect to learn?
• Take advantage of SQL Server™ Analysis Services for OLAP and Tabular solutions, including business measure aggregation over multiple dimensions and KPIs.
• Use SQL Server™ engine as a scalable, high-performance data storage engine for building efficient data warehouses.
• Learn extract, transform, and load an (ETL) operation that enables the population and synchronization of your data warehouse with SQL Server™ Integration Services.
• Deliver business information through Microsoft SQL Server™ Reporting Services, Microsoft® Office System like Excel and PowerPivot.
• Use Master Data Services (MDS) and Data Quality Services (DQS) as a Knowledge-Driven data quality framework, enabling IT Pros and data stewards to easily improve the quality of their data.
If you are interested in learning more, I suggest you look into the following offerings;
1. The SQL Server® 2012 Business Intelligence Academy
2. The Premier and PFE – Microsoft SharePoint 2013 and SQL Server 2012 Business Intelligence Operations Day
More to follow on these two items shortly!
Regards
Mark Sewell – UK PFE