Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information

Division of Knowledge Management

Business Intelligence (Assignment 1)

Information capture - other than structured data from core transactional processing systems, BI Analysis and Intelligence Proposition

Submitted By

THANGAVELU MUTHU KUMAAR (G1101765E)

BALASUBRAMANIAN DIVYA (G1101736H)

SELVARAJU NIRMALA (G1101760J)

The changing nature of communication channels in enterprises, new ways of technology integration with

traditional processing, affordability of simple programming devices or interfaces like QR codes, bar codes,

RFID and bio metrics, robustness of wireless network infrastructure and massive capabilities of data centres

have facilitated to the growth of this information era. It is a challenging task to collect the information from

multiple sources of enterprises, interpret with appropriate context to transform it into knowledge to help in

decision making. The distinct steps described by Gilad and Gilad (1985) provides a best systems approach and

help in running through the goal of intelligence transformation from information which is other than the

traditional internal processing data (like sentiments and opinions expressed in internet and social media, social

network analysis, SME reports, internal audit reports, market research, news agencies, consultant and analyst

reports). These data are typically from external sources existing in structured and unstructured data. Similar kind

of web 2.0 interaction data in enterprise portals, Enterprise Applications usage, internal social network analysis,

chats and Expert information can be internal sources which have not been looked upon in most organizations

presently. They tend to be more in unstructured forms as they are directly contributed by people as in web 2.0.

Information to Intelligence Mapping with BI Process:

The degree of intelligence derived by the enterprises by acting upon accessible information with BI processes

determines the level of optimum usage of the existing resources and an understanding of their stands in the

market place which guides organizations in scaling their success.

Figure 1: Information to Intelligence Mapping (Gilad and Gilad, 1985)

Collection:

Sources and Types of Information:

The business management depends on BI solutions, to make delicate decisions, as well as to modify or adjust

the business strategies and business process and to achieve competitive advantage and improve business

operation and profitability.

The reasons why organisations depend on information are, to carry out strategic planning, intelligent recording

and relaying, controlling and monitoring, measuring and decision-making.

Information needs are clearly different at different levels of management - the strategic, tactical, and operative

levels (Uusi-Rauva, 1994).

Operative Intelligence requires more of internal information that is detailed, specific and historical

(McGonagle and Vella, 1996). This information comes mostly from core transactional systems and it is mostly

structured in nature. These are used for operations monitoring, setting standards for processes, quality control

and production related activities. Some of the sources of internal structured information are from functional and

integrative technology services like Radio frequency (RF) technologies, Computer-aided design (CAD) systems,

Demand forecasting management (DFM), Collaborative planning, forecasting, and replenishment (CFRP)

systems, Manufacturing execution systems (MES), Order management systems (OMS), Product data

management (PDM) systems, Supply chain event management (SCEM) systems, Geo-coded Service tracking

systems, Transportation management systems (TMS), Warehouse management systems (WMS) , Enterprise

resource planning (ERP) systems, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) systems, Enterprise Knowledge

Portal (EKP) Systems, Customer/supplier relationship management (CRM/SRM), Supply chain planning (SCP)

systems (Krmac EV, 2011) .

Strategic intelligence is often derived from movement of market, competitors and customers. They help the

organization to plan their business strategies – market expansions, new product launch, benchmarking standards,

policy restructuring, mergers and acquisitions. These sources of information are mostly external to the

organization and more of broad, integrated and upcoming in nature (McGonagle and Vella, 1996). They are

obtained from market research and consulting firms like Mckinsey, Nielsen, Ipsos, Ernst and Young and similar

others. They may be structured or unstructured. Also this information can be obtained from internet with web

crawlers to capture the relevant customer trends and sentiments, economic and financial news, and competitor’s

innovation, branding and marketing strategies. This information from new s feeds, user comments on social

media is unstructured where there is a high reliance on text and context mining techniques to extract the useful

information to transform into intelligence.

Tactical Intelligence is a balance between strategic and operational moves with slightly more internal sources

than external. These sources are used to manage risks in the operational monitoring stage such as demand

forecasting, logistics optimization, process improvement, economies of scale. These sources also include

significant sources of external conditions like weather patterns or environmental conditions in the raw materials

supplier region, political conditions in the operating regions and supply demand management with sales

channels which can exist in unstructured as well as structured forms

The data from different kind of information systems other than core transactional processing systems like

Executive Support Systems helping the senior management with more external and less internal information

sources (highly structured with appropriate returns) to base their strategic decisions, Management information

systems helping in aligning information about people, process and technology to business, typically internal

(more structured and less unstructured forms), Decision-support systems helping management make decisions

in uncertainty about the possible outcomes for which sources can be external or internal existing in mostly

structured information rather than unstructured , Knowledge Management Systems helping businesses create

and share information which has its sources internal and is typically unstructured, Office Automation Systems

trying to improve the productivity of employees who need to process data and information and they are again

internal sources which are but structured (Mahesh Raisinghani, 2004).

The various internal and sources for an enterprise analyzed with Business Information Cube Framework

(Hannula & Pirttimäki 2004) are listed down as in table 1 (Appendix)

This information can further be analyzed based on their form of existence (Structured and unstructured) with the

framework of Hervonen (2004) for information classification.

Evaluation:

Why Organizations limit themselves to the internal structured Information:

There is a well known dark-side to the information technology and the communication revolution; those would

be information overload and attention fragmentation. These factors are strongly considered as afflictions by the

senior executives because they need uninterrupted time to assess and process the information collected.

Research conducted on various disciplines seems to prove that the performance of an individual is influenced

with the amount of information they receive up to a certain saturation point; beyond that point the performance

rapidly declines.

Figure 2. Information overload as inverted U-Curve.

Qualities of Information:

Despite the amount of information, the nature of the information also contributes to the ‘overload’ attribute of

the information. The nature of the information includes: Level of ambiguity of the information, Level of novelty

of the information, complexity, intensity, conciseness, consistency, comprehensibility. In addition to this there

are other dimensions the quality of information should have that determines its usefulness to the organization -

Inherent qualities and the pragmatic qualities. The inherent quality is the correctness of the data or the

information, whereas the pragmatic quality is the relevancy of the data to the context of the organization and its

need for that information.

Though the technology in present day makes a wide range of information accessible, it is important to analyse

the business environment extensively to know what is and what is not required at that point of time (Choo,

2002). After selecting the right information, there is a need to assess the existing information gap and map how

the new information transformed into intelligence can help in decision support.

Storage, Analysis and Dissemination:

The evaluated data is moved to data warehouse and is then used to analyze and synthesize the information from

the many different sources, emulate on its implications to the organizations, apply guesses and judgements, and

make strategic decisions to make best use of it.

The reporting environment of a BI tool helps us to visualize the data typically into Spreadsheets with Query,

reporting and data visualization tools and OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) with increasingly popular

Data, Text, Sentiment, Opinion and Web mining components. Powell (1996) calls the refinement process a BI

value chain which is cyclical and ongoing in nature

Real time BI analysis, mobile and cloud based BI solutions can also help in solving many operational

challenges. For example, this helped British Petroleum in their innovative ways of Oil Exploration, Production,

Processing initiatives and in transforming their conventional operations to sustain their competitive edge.

o Oil Rigs è Digital Oil Platforms - 3D and 4D Seismic imaging, Augmented Reality based simulation

o Oil Recovery è Optimized Oil Recovery and Refining - Real time monitoring of mature fields

Typical BI applications

In general, BI solutions help in breaking the Information Silos spanning geographies - within and across internal

department systems (Legacy mainframes, ERP, CRM), Supplier systems and Customer systems. Some of the

specific examples are as follows

Logistics Optimization: Achieving a cost-effective means of transport. (Business intelligence software

can facilitate a fast and easy selection of the best means of transport considering a vast number of

factors in selecting the means of transport are physical characteristics of the load, the number of loads

to be moved, the distance to be covered, the required speed of movement, the required proof of

delivery, cost of building/dismantling loads, packaging costs, space requirements, interface with other

storage, transport and handling systems and housekeeping issues) and considering also historic data

and past experience.)

Operational standard and Quality maintenance: Evaluating the operations performed in the

company (generating reports), evaluating strategic factors (internal and external) and identifying

patterns of business and operational behaviour (using data mining techniques).Implement dashboards

and scoreboards so that executives and supervisors can quickly recognize operational exceptions or key

performance indicators (KPI) that fall outside of accepted ranges. Some of the important KPIs could be

planning accuracy, capacity utilization, resource utilization, load balancing, route utilization,

scheduling accuracy, vehicle availability, vehicle loading time, average transit time, cost of

transportation per ton, on time vehicle arrival, vehicle unloading time, order receipt accuracy,

percentage of goods damaged, total order delivery time, on time deliveries, goods delivery rate,

transportation costs and others.

Challenges in the intelligence transformation:

Technology acceptance at different levels of users, Human Information Behaviour in information consumption,

Security considerations and access to information, Difficulty in extracting data from internet with Natural

Language Processing, word sense disambiguation, costs and time in implementing cross organizational

infrastructure and rapid obsolescence of technology are some of the key challenges in collecting and

transforming the information and which sometimes prevents the organizations in realizing the true value of

Business Intelligence Solutions.

References:

Mahesh Raisinghani (2004), Business intelligence in the digital economy: opportunities, limitations, and risks,

Hershey PA : Idea Group Pub., c2004

Gilad, B. and Gilad, T. (1985), A Systems Approach to Business Intelligence. Business Horizons. Vol. 28, No. 5,

pp. 65-70

Krmac Evelin Vatovec (2011), Intelligent Value Chain Networks: Business Intelligence and Other ICT Tools and

Technologies in Supply/Demand Chains, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Maritime Studies and Transport

McGonagle, J. J. and Vella, C. M. (1996), A New Archetype for Competitive Intelligence. Quorum Books,

Westport, CT.

Choo, C. W. (2002), Information Management for the Intelligent Organization: The Art of Scanning the

Environment. 3rd Edition. Information Today, Medford, NJ.

Hannula, M. & Pirttimäki, V (2004), A Cube of Business Information. The SCIP 04 Annual International

Conference & Exhibit, March 22 – 25, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Gilad, B. and Herring, J. P. (2004), The Art and Science of Business Intelligence Analysis. Part A: Business

Intelligence Theory, Principles, Practices, and Uses. JAI Press, Greenwich, CT, pp. 159-180.

Appendix

Type SourceSubject

Qualitative Quantitative

Internal External Internal External

Internal Information , Manufacturing and Quality control Systems and maintenance logs, employee surveys, Enterprise 2.0 data, Intellectual Property Audit Reports, Information Security Audit, Customer service/ Call centre reports, Records of the people employed by the business, Tacit knowledge and practices of SMEs captured in meetings, discussions

Social network data, Agency/ Analysts/ Research reports, University/ Research databases, government agency policy data, Scientific publications, Social Media, promotional campaigns , trade events, social contracts, Patent Applications, environmental,health & safety regulation and employment laws

Process Audit Reports, Quality Management/ Assurance Reports, Production Reports, Reports on liquidity, cash flow and investments, financial statements, Marketing, Sales, Organic growth and market value reports, Data on the costs associated with business processes

Agency/ Analysts/ Research reports, Investment hedging reports, Market share / Sales volume fluctuation reports

External Infrastructure and equipment Lease reports, Third party expert (Consulting firms) audit/ advisory services, General Broking services reports, Sustainability compliance reports,

Newsfeeds, Government reports, Supplier, Partners, Distributors, Retailer surveys and reports, Agency/ Analysts/ Research reports about competitors and market, Press releases, Bench marking standards of competitors

Bank/ financial institutions transactional reports, Insurance transactional reports, Supplier, Retailer, Partners, Distributors transactional reports, Electronic broking services reports

Market Research Agency/ Analysts/ Research reports about competitors and market, World Bank/IMF/ News Agency like Bloomberg Economic indicators data, Meteorological data

Table 1. Business Information Cube Framework

Fig: 3 Business Information Classification (adapted from Hervonen, 2004).