Business intelligence--main instrument of modern management.

Voicu, Vasilica

1. INTRODUCTION

The informational modern society the people are building is defined as a knowledge society and an organizational one.

The knowledge-based organizations are the clever collective factors having a role of modeling the economic environment into the direction of informational competition. So these actors belong to modern times in their quality of managers and professionals. They sustain the scientific research in order to obtain the final result of joining both the ideas and the operational structure into a social and durable entity (Filip, 2005).

Using as brick and mortar the knowledge is the success formula against the limits of low-developed society as it was till few years ago. The function for the informational companies requires an enhanced activity in direction of innovation, learning and partnership interactions. So there is done the way for the new intelligent technologies.

"Business Intelligence" is a very and widely used business concept, and one of the most appealed modern management instruments. There are trends in management like Balance Core Card, Management Objectives, Key Performance Indicators, Empowerment, Organizational Outsourcing--that become a more and more important "power horse" for efficiency. But all such concepts are nothing in the situation of lack of IT powerful instruments for feed-back. So, it is a two ways conditional process: concept-IT and IT-concept.

Business Intelligence represents a set of methods and ideas having as target to enhancing decision making events by the use of IT technology. There are three level of integration into organization of BI--among them the first means the information consolidation into one single space, and then after that it is issued the diffusion of reports toward each manager according to their needs.

Business Intelligence is the process looking to forecast and influence a future performance for the company, starting with the momentum of understanding in depth about the present situation. Without BI it is consider that the companies are not capable to build and maintain a competitive advantage because of low capacity to understand the needs of customers for personalized services.

Another trigger-element sustaining the investment in BI is the capacity of the package of software applications to generate an aggregate picture upon the company performance and in the same time to offer a better transparency toward shareholders (Filip, 2005). The platform of BI allows the transformation of data into action decisions.

The dynamics of economy and the contemporaneous IT jump business make the BI application the indispensable instruments for every business. There are worldwide opinions sustaining a continuous development of IT applications in order to cover the information volume being into an increasing process estimated to 20 times more in 2012 than in 2007.

The threat in this area comes not only from the upward jump in the size of data bases, but also from the increasing complexity of such applications offering the possibility to the users to compete in the market.

For giving the solution to different situation, BI models are integrated by mathematical functions that are able to identify trends in companies' performance ratio. In the same the number of users without a background in IT has imposed a trend toward simplifying such IT solutions.

2. THE INTEGRATION OF BI APPLICATIONS INTO IT EXISTING SYSTEM

Having an activity history, the companies collect more and more data bases regarding the business flows and commercial transactions. The former classic IT data base administration solutions did not offer support for an in-deep analysis and structural evolution high-degree performance reports. Such old applications were especially focused on administration of receivables, inventories--having only the first level difficulty functions. The new applications come with enhance operative functions looking to cover all relations involved in the activity of a subject company, being in fact a package of services of Enterprise Relationship Planning topic. It can be said that the BI solutions are built in order to enhance data analysis. Under such premises the information are set on level of structures looking to offering answers for each kind of identified situation. Data deposits, multi-dimensions structures, and data mining are only few examples of technologies capable to offer a focused analysis.

Business intelligent applications can be considered as an intermediary operator between the data base and manager, offering both the possibility of analysis and also the chance of profitable decision issue.

3. INTEGRATION OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE WITHIN DATA BASES

The producers of data base administration software include high performance BI functions that efficiently communicate with traditional IT solutions. By this way, beside the support for the classical relational data bases and analysis there are offered advanced and performance techniques of information collect and administration.

BI applications are designated for collection, maintaining and use of available data in order to sustain the decisions makers, having in structure the following technologies:

--SSD--Decision Support Systems--OLAP--Online Analytical Processing --Data--Warehouse--Data Mining

These technologies allow a multi-dimensions analysis and a use of mathematical models for forecasting the economy trend based on the information existing in data bases. Additionally, there are added instruments (like Extract Transform Load) that allow a data consolidation inside the already created data base (Whalen et al., 2007).

So, all successful software applications include also functions of business intelligence. The share market of this kind of IT suppliers is more and more dynamic, existing more and more different IT programs.

The main companies very actively inside this domain, using such performance-oriented instruments, are:

--IBM (DB2 Universal Database): IBM DB2 Cube Views is a good quality accelerator of the Online Analytical Processing Family (OLAP), applied for multi-dimensions analyses; IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner is a good application using for its analysis the instruments of data mining. -Microsoft (SQL Server) is equipped with complete intelligent business integrated services using a SQL data base. As example, Microsoft Reporting Services is a report solution that allows obtaining reports from BI application using WEB as link, and Microsoft Analysis Services is another integrated application being able to do OLAP analysis and data mining (Melomed et al., 2007).

--Oracle (Data Base Oracle) comes also with a set of BI solutions focused on different categories of users. The concept named CPM (Corporate Performance Management) includes methodologies, statistics, processes, and systems in order to fulfill the tasks regarding the performance measurement and management.

Additional to this international operators, on the Romanian market there are active several players offering pretty good solutions:

--Cognos products offer a complete set of BI functions, among them it can be noticed: OLAP, data base reviewing, reports, so on.

--SPSS and Business Object are two complete business applications allowing operations in area of statistics and data mining, reports and data analysis.

--ProClarity comes with an easier way for management analysis, and he WEB based application leads to an enhanced access of information.

--CorVu package is a business intelligence solution for management looking to cover needs in area of better performance for financial and operational divisions. This package is integrated with ERP solution produced by QAD.

The interest for business intelligence products has increased due to their possibility to come with flexibility and quick access to reports. Compared to traditional data bases, the new solutions prove to be better in generating analysis in real time or ad-hoc report leading to decreased expenses and time saving (Whalen et al., 2007). But the degree of implementing in economy for the new BI integrated software is still low because the companies prefer a development in only few sectors of business, considered as critic importance sectors, for the rest of them looking to cover by traditional solutions.

Romanian market knows a trend toward maturity, and so it is a general perception about the necessity to be ready for the challenges coming from united Europe. It is a sign about the increasing number of companies looking to create efficiency in their activity as a long term strategy by implementing business intelligence solutions.

4. ROMANIAN TIME: FEATURES AND PRIORITIES

For Romania the way for development will mean a society built on information as a condition of a long term success. In this context the idea according to which Romania knows a too high gap versus developed countries, and so the issue of information is only for the future, would be a dangerous one.

Being integrated into a worldwide economy, Romanian one was not able to create an exception related to knowledge orientation, but because of a lack of strategic policy there was a non-continuous implementation in all economic sectors for BI solutions that have lead to potential loses at all levels (execution, administration, intermediation, conception).

The big companies have an activity addicted to their hierarchic structure even in the case of a high degree of IT implementation. In return, the small companies but with foreign trade activity know already the managerial practices based on knowledge.

So there remains a national imperative way the creation of companies built on knowledge as a main growing source for sustaining a higher level of domestic competition and an international identity.

An interesting priority would and should be the implementation of modules or disciplines revealing the knowledge management in academic teaching programs, or the use of national-wide projects relating to Internet science of communication.

5. REFERENCES

Filip, F. G.(2005). Computer-linked decision, Technical Publisher, Romania

Melomed, E.; I. Gorbach; Al. Berger; PY Bateman (2007). Microsoft SQL server 2005, Analysis Services, Sams Publishing

Whalen, E.; M. Garcia; B. Patel; S. Misner; V. Isakov (2007). Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Administrator's Companion, Microsoft Press, 2007.

*** Solid Quality Learning: Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Database Essentials, Microsoft Press, 2007. http://www.microsoft.com/sql/solutions/bi/default.mspx Accessed: 2008-01-06 http://www.siveco.ro Accessed: 2008-01-08 http://www.acigrup.com Accessed: 2008-01-07 http://www.microsoft.com/BusinessSolutions Accessed: 2008-01-06