Finance Management System

SFSU Business Intelligence > Technical Overview

Business Intelligence Technical Overview

An information analysis and reporting tool

Commonly referred to as a BI tool, this is the user friendly application providing the necessary interactivity through a graphical interface. The power and simplicity of BI tools is derived from the dimensional data design of the data warehouse – all of the information required by the BI tools is contained within a simple star schema and the associated metadata.

A typical modern day BI tool installation consists of a Web and Application server as well as a browser based client. The web and application servers provide the agility required for mass reporting and analysis. Application server (also known as a report server) handles user query processing and database interaction including caching and automatic use of aggregate tables where appropriate. The web server supports rich browser based functionality.


A dashboard is a report that provides a quick glance at the high level numbers. Dashboards can be automatically or manually refreshed at a click of a mouse. The dashboard content is only restricted by the user's creativity and can contain any design element such as graphs. One can, for example, track the budget by instantly reviewing the latest numbers upon a dashboard refresh.

Report authoring is done using a rich graphical development environment within the browser. One can easily create reports or perform statistical analyses. Reports can be scheduled and their results can be output to PDF, Excel, and other formats. Also, the results and the content of the reports can be imported into Microsoft Office. The access to reports and information can be secured at a very granular level.

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Last modified January 14, 2008 by IS Projects Web Team