Business Intelligence in Information Technology

IT stands for Information Technology. Information Technology is a system designed to gather, process, or distribute information.  IT can be inspected in terms of the following three groupings; the data gathering, the data processing, and the data distribution.

Information Technology deals with all types of data in which information can be extracted from. It may seem simple but the entire process is extremely complex. Without the sophisticated applications in the Business Intelligence software this information would remain unseen. Without Information Technology, Business Intelligence software would also be useless.

How is Information Technology related to Business Intelligence?

Considering the information we discussed earlier it is safe to assume that IT and Business Intelligence work together to perform the data related tasks that organization’s need to have done. Information Technology is present in almost all of the tools provided by the Business Intelligence systems. The data used in all of the analysis applications is gathered through the process of Information Technology.

The list of tools that use Information Technology is endless. Information Technology is the core of all of the processes involved in the Business Intelligence applications that deal with gathering, storing, sorting, and as said before analyzing data for an organization. Another way that Information Technology is related to Business Intelligence is the way in which the data and the information extracted from the data is identified and distributed into the allocated areas in which the information belongs.

This process ensures that all of the information is in its right place when managers, executives, or other Business Intelligence software users access the applications they need. The process leaves little room for error if the Business Intelligence solution was integrated properly, and no relevant information is distributed to the wrong area. When you consider this it is easy to see how closely the two are related, and how vital each one is to the other.

Business Intelligence Applications that involve IT processes

We are now going to explore some of the Business Intelligence applications or tools that involve Information Technology, we will also go over how Information Technology is used by these tools.

The first and most obvious Business Application that works directly with Information Technology are Statistics. Statistics help the managers and executives of an organization get a good idea of what is happening, what has happened, and what may happen within their enterprise.

Statistics – Statistics are mathematical methods involving the compilation, analysis, interpretation or explanation, and presentation of data. Statistics can be applied to an expansive variety of disciplines. Statistics with Business Intelligence however is used by managers and executives for making informed decisions. Statistical methods are normally used to describe in detail the collection of data. This is called descriptive statistics. Also, repeated changes in data can be sorted in a manner that accounts for unpredictability and uncertainty in the observations, and afterwards used to draw conclusions about the processes being studied. This is known as inferential statistics.

Statistics are related to Information Technology through the processes used to collect the data used to form statistical views. This information is vital to statistics, and without it organizations would be in the dark when considering the patterns of their enterprise’s functions.

Next we will look into data analysis, more specifically technical data analysis. This tool is used to analyze technical data collected for the purpose of reviewing any type of technical issues.

Technical Data Analysis – This is most commonly known as the process of looking at technical data and summing up the data with the purpose to extract any available useful technical information and then use that information to draw conclusions. This data analysis process in closely related to the data mining applications we discussing in previous articles, with the exception that data mining tends to focus on larger data sets, and placing less importance on any type of reasoning process, and it often uses data that was originally compiled for a different reason all together.

Technical data analysis is often split into Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) and Confirmatory Data Analysis (CDA). Exploratory Data Analysis focuses mainly on discovering new data, where as Confirmatory Data Analysis is centered around confirming or falsifying existing hypotheses.

Technical data analysis uses Information Technology in a similar way to statistics tools. It takes the information gathers by Information Technology and processes in, categorizes it, and allocates it into valid departments. It is not hard to see how Information Technology is tightly intertwined with Business Intelligence.

Finally we will quickly delve into Business Process Management applications. These applications are a vital tool for the management and monitoring of the processes used within organizations.

Business Process Management (BPM) – This is the growing fields of knowledge and research at the junction between management and Information Technology, surrounding methods, techniques and tools to create, portray, manipulate, and analyze operational business processes usually concerning people, organizations, applications, documents, and all other known sources of business information.

Business Process Management involves activities performed by organizations to manage and if needed to improve their personal business processes. Though this type of goal has been long lived, new software tools knowing as Business Performance Management systems have allowed such activities to be completed in less time and with less cost to the organization. These Business Performance Management tools monitor the execution of the organization’s business processes so that managers and executives and analyze and if needed change processes in response to data rather then instinct.

Business Process Management is a management tool that enables the users to manage their processes as if they were any other assets and improve them over time. Good Business Process Management applications allow organizations to monitor and make changes on a day to day basis, this directly results in a well planned and functioning organization.

This application is perhaps one of the most closely related to Information Technology, it is easy to explain how Information Technology works with Business Process Management and why they work so well together. It shows how Information Technology is deeply rooted in most applications, especially those that are designed to deliver data to Business Intelligence application users.

Conclusion

After looking briefly into the relationship between Business Intelligence and Information Technology it is no surprise to find that the two are very much alike. Each one supports the other in order to complete tasks. It seems to be our nature to overlook the details involved with how the technology we use each day actually function, and the relationships between those technologies. Information Technology has existed for far longer then most may think, it was not until Business Intelligence software debuted that Information Technology actually realized its potential. If you take a moment to consider your own computer applications, the ones you use each day, and remember the definition of Information Technology, you may be surprised to find that you are putting Information Technology to work for you right now.