Agenda
      •  Business Analytics (BA): Overview
      •  Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
      •  Reports and Queries
      •  Multidimensionality
      •  Advanced Business Analytics
      •  Data Visualization
      •  Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
      •  Real-time Business Intelligence, Automated Decision 
         Support (ADS), and Competitive Intelligence
      •  Business Analytics and the Web: Web Intelligence and 
         Web Analytics
      •  Usage, Benefits, and Success of Business Analytics
          Business Analytics (BA): Overview
        •    Business analytics (BA) is a broad category of applications and techniques for 
             gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users 
             make better business and strategic decisions. 
        •    BA is also known as analytical processing, BI tools, BI applications, and just BI.
        •    BI is becoming a major tool for most medium and large corporations.  Pizza Hut 
             knows what kind of pizzas customers order, what kind of coupons they usually use, 
             and how much customers spend in a given time period.
        •    Marketing managers can run this information through a BI analysis that forecasts, for 
             example, the probability of  a customer’s next order.
        •    The company then uses this information to determine marketing strategies to 
             influence the customer to buy more pizzas without spending more on that marketing 
             strategy than it has to.
        •    Example: An analytic application used for a loan application might:
               – Calculate a credit-worthiness score
               – Automatically accept or deny the loan application
               – Select the loan limit
               – Select which credit card product (interest rate, payment terms, etc.) to issue to this 
                   application or which other type of loan to approve.
             Tools and Techniques of BA
       MicroStrategy’s classification of BA tools:
       •   Enterprise reporting: highly formatted static reports destined for 
           broad distribution. They are pixel-perfect report formats for 
           operational reporting and dashboards.
       •   Cube analysis: provide simple OLAP multidimensional slice-and-
           dice analytical capabilities to business managers in a limited-range 
           environment.
       •   Ad hoc querying and analysis: power users can query a database 
           for any answer, slice-and-dice the entire database, and drill down to 
           the lowest level of transactional information. 
       •   Statistical analysis and data mining: perform predictive analysis or 
           to discover the cause-and-effect correlation between two metrics.
       •   Report delivery and alerting: proactively send full reports or alerts to 
           large user populations (internal and external), based on 
           subscription, schedules, or threshold events in the database.
     Tools and Techniques of BA
   SAP’s classification of strategic enterprise 
    management: operational, managerial, and 
    strategic. SAP offers three levels of support:
   • Operational: SAP ERP mainly supports 
    transaction processing on the operational level.
   • Managerial: middle managers can use SAP R/3 
    to access all reports, arranged by functional 
    areas. Managers can make queries and drill 
    down.
   • Strategic: SAP offers products under the title 
    SAP SEM (Strategic Enterprise Management), 
    which includes BA.
             Tools and Techniques of BA
       Executive information and support systems. Many BI activities evolved 
           from two tools:
       •   An executive information system (EIS) is a computer based system 
           that serves the information needs of top executives. It provides rapid 
           access to timely and relevant information, to aid in monitoring an 
           organization’s performance by directly accessing management 
           reports and to improve managerial growth and learning.
       •   An EIS is very user friendly, is supported by graphics, and provides 
           the capabilities of exception reporting (i.e., reporting only the results 
           that deviate from a set standard) and drill down (i.e., investigating 
           information in increasing details).
       •   Executive support systems (ESS) is a comprehensive support 
           system that goes beyond EIS to include analysis support, 
           communications, office automation, and intelligence support.