week1 introduction to BI application

Business Intelligence application is a fascinating unit. Rob gave a broad description on BI in week one lecture, but there were things I don’t agree with. Rob said some BI applications were powerful enough to be built directly on top of the existing systems. It would be fantastic if we could plug and play BI just like how we use USB drive, but there are issues around BI which need to be addressed if we want to reach the full potential of BI. Many organizations today have dozens of different information systems and each of those systems may be built with different languages and data format. Those systems usually have multiple version of the same fact and don’t talk with each other. In other words, data integrity and consistency is not guaranteed. BI application draws data from a wide range of information system to support decision making. Garbage - in and garbage – out theory suggests that the quality of information produced by computer applications is only as good as the data being used. If the input data is poor, no matter how good a BI application is, it will produce wrong information which has negative value to decision makers. So before a company implements BI, it must cleanse the data and integrate information systems. This can be done through implementing an ERP system in which a centralized database system and web services are used to extract and manage data from multiple system.
I didn’t ask Rob why BI can even be built on top of existing system directly. But I guess it’s probably because many vendors lie about what their BI applications can do to generate more sales.