BI²: from Business Intelligence to Enterprise IT Integration 2011

The original Data Warehouse architecture of the 1980s separated “decision support” from day-to-day business operations. This supported Decision-Making needs at the time and was easily implemented on then emerging technologies, such as relational databases. However, today’s Business needs fully integrated processes, closely linking information and activities from all areas of the Enterprise. Decision-Making and Action-Taking are tightly bound. Business cycles are dramatically shorter and span company boundaries. So far, Enterprise IT, including Business Intelligence, has responded slowly and incoherently.

Business Integrated Insight (BI²) is a new architecture that reintegrates all Decision-Making and Action-Taking into the overall processes of the Business. Starting from the Data Warehouse, it incorporates a variety of technological advances, such as SOA, distributed access, Web technologies, Content Management and specialised relational databases. BI² thus provides a comprehensive structure for the full Enterprise IT integration demanded by modern Businesses. In addition, it directly addresses the current Data Warehousing issues, such as operational BI, executive Decision-Support, comprehensive information discovery and innovation, and Enterprise-Wide Decision Management. And, although novel, BI² is designed as an evolution from current Data Warehouse, operational and collaborative technologies.

What you will learn:

• The technical rationale and Business need for a new architectural approach
• Structure and components of the BI² architecture
• The possibilities and challenges of new database technologies
• The role of SOA in ETL and Metadata delivery
• Pros and cons of federated access to information
• Integration of unstructured content and structured data
• Positioning and using Web and Enterprise 2.0 in support of Decision-Making