Article Review - Instant Insight

Your article reviews should follow the following format. Copy these review points into a Word file and submit in the required Dropbox:

1. What is the main point the author is trying to get across?

The author, Alan Joch, is writing this article to emphasize the point that the nature of business intelligence in the enterprise world is changing. As stated in the article "This tight integration of BI functions and increasing sophistication of tools is helping redefine how BI is used in the enterprise today. No longer is BI thought of only as a strategic aid; rather, it's increasingly used in making daily decisions about a business's operations." BI is being more integrated into all functions across a business organization. The users are more in control of the data and are better able to use this information to make decision and better serve their customers.

2. Indicate 3 pertinent points that enforce the author's point of view. Fully define these points.

The first point that Alan Joch is emphasizing is that BI systems are becoming more integrated. This means that not only is the data available quicker and in most case, more efficient, but it is also coming from one data warehouse or source. In the past, a lot of data came from different servers. If one server was down, you weren't able to get complete data causing many roadblocks in business especially if you needed to pull sales reports or inventory information. In the past few years, more BI systems are integrated in which they operate on the same platform. Oracle BI is a perfect example of having a "one stop shop" in order to obtain information across multiple business functions as defined perfectly in the flow chart in the article.

The next point that is important in this article is that there are other forms of BI that can be used, specifically web applications. There is an increasing opportunity for BI applications to use functionality distributed across the internet. An example of this from the article is Oracle's Clickstream Intelligence which is used for measuring Web-site performance, visitor traffic, customer loyalty, and effectiveness of Web content. These types of web application functions are critical to measuring areas of customer interests for the customer relations area. Also, using the customer/user data from the web effectively can help in producing online-based reports and in use of Oracle's online based reports like 'Discoverer' which I have utilized in some of my past work experiences. This type of application pulls web based data and creates reports based on user inputs.

Lastly, Alan Joch is expressing the importance of the user in business intelligence. The user now has the power to develop and implement different reports and data mining tactics that will help obtain more meaningful and useful information for their day to day operations. Because all of the data for a specific company is already embedded in the software platform or data ware house it is now easier for users or managers to develop reports by pulling specific demographic information or sales information by selecting key variables in a report. Users are more adaptable to the day to day business information and gain a better understanding of business functions because they have the power to do