RESEARCH & RESOURCES

Enterprise Business Intelligence Defined

To help you make your way through the many powerful case studies and “lessons from the experts” articles in What Works in Enterprise Business Intelligence, we have arranged them into specific categories: agile business intelligence, enterprise business intelligence, managed SaaS business intelligence, open source business intelligence, and predictive analytics and text mining. What do these terms mean, and how do they apply to your organization?

Agile Business Intelligence

Agile business intelligence covers techniques and methods for delivering BI solutions faster and with higher degrees of user satisfaction, such as agile software development techniques and other methods and tools that accelerate development, testing, and deployment.

Enterprise Business Intelligence

Enterprise business intelligence is the deployment of BI throughout an enterprise, usually through the combination of an enterprise data warehouse and an enterprise license to a BI platform or tool set that can be used by business users in various roles.

Managed SaaS Business Intelligence

Software-as-a-service enables business intelligence customers to run BI applications via a hosted service by uploading their data and configuring an online application to meet their needs. Then users simply point their Web browsers to the service, log in, and begin viewing and interacting with reports and dashboards containing their data.

Open Source Business Intelligence

Open source business intelligence tools are available through an open source license, which means they can be downloaded and used free of charge—but many open source BI tools also offer a premium version with additional features for a fee.

Predictive Analytics and Text Mining

Predictive analytics includes techniques for identifying relationships and patterns in large volumes of data and using those patterns to create predictive models. Text mining parses unstructured data (text, mostly) so entities can be stored in databases along with structured data and then queried to create reports and analyses.

This article originally appeared in the issue of .

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