Finance Management System

SFSU Business Intelligence > Functional Overview

Business Intelligence Functional Overview


What is Business Intelligence?

In general, Business Intelligence (BI) is a combination of software, computer hardware, and human subject matter expertise aimed at providing us with a solid foundation for fast and intuitive information analysis.

BI is the means of acquiring knowledge about the different aspects of a business. Typically, the BI audience already has the necessary data interpretation skills, and BI makes it easy for them to perform data analysis and generate reports.

At SF State, some sample scenarios might include the following:

  • "We need to have a clear financial picture tailored to different audiences so that we can improve university grants management and satisfy audit requirements."
  • "We want to analyze student information so that we can increase our enrollment."
  • "Because human resources comprise 80% - 90% of fiscal affairs budget, we must be able to easily analyze labor costs so that we can study reorganization scenarios, perform salary projections and tracking, and more."

These scenarios lend themselves to Business Intelligence due to its inherent ability to provide flexible decision-making support.

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Why Business Intelligence?

The design of PeopleSoft HRMS and FMS as well as SIMS transactional systems at SF State is not optimal for reporting. These systems are made for capturing large volumes of transactions, but they are not meant for information analysis.

BI, on the other hand, stores a copy of the transactional data in format designed for reporting and analysis.
Transactional System Characteristics
Business Intelligence Characteristics
Processing a large volume of small transactions (e.g., student tuition payments) Processing a small volume of large analytical requests (e.g., tuition projections)
Controlled, well structured requests Ad hoc requests
Accessing small amounts of data Accessing massive amounts of data
Response time in less than a second desired Response time ranging from seconds to hours
 

As seen in the table to the left, business intelligence is meant for supporting business decisions while a transactional system is not.

Business Intelligence gives the end users a separate, unified system dedicated to self-service , fast , intuitive , and powerful reporting and information analysis including statistics, predictive forecasting, historical trend analysis, and more.

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How does it work?

BI integrates the data from a variety of transactional information sources (a.k.a. systems of record) into a comprehensive reporting oriented data repository and provides a powerful tool that the business users can use for self service analysis and reporting.

The main advantage of a BI system is its unique design. A BI system is different from a transactional system in two major ways:

  • The information within the BI system is positioned to reflect the way the business works.
  • The entire BI system is kept in a physically separate computer hardware environment due to specific performance requirements.

This ensures that the following conditions are met:
  • The BI information accommodates the business decision makers.
  • The BI system performance is better.
  • The transactional system is unaffected by the reporting taking place in the BI system.

As seen in the picture below, the diagram on the left is a complex web of information representing a typical transactional system design known as OLTP (On Line Transaction Processing). The star schema (or star join) in the middle is typical of an analytical system design known as OLAP (On Line Analytical Processing), which is a simple and straight forward representation of the business. The OLAP cube on the right is an easy way for business people to visualize their information and target specific data. This kind of data structure is a key part of a data warehouse.


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Summary

Once in place, BI enables business decision makers to get the information they need when they need it.

BI provides users with the flexibility to slice and dice the data based on any number of criteria including drilling up to see high level summaries or drilling down to the supporting detail information. Business people can focus on scenarios addressing student enrollment, budgeting and forecasting, and better financial management by analyzing the corresponding information and studying the possible outcomes. All of this can be done easily with a user friendly tool, which offers:

  • Point and click
  • Drag and drop
  • Speed
  • Security
  • Drilling
  • Report automation
  • Office integration
  • Output to PDF, Excel, etc.
  • Flexibility
  • And much more

With this kind of business intelligence functionality, the information analysis and reporting at SF State can be transformed into a robust, scalable environment.

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Last modified January 14, 2008 by IS Projects Web Team