Business Intelligence (BI) supersedes MIS
Author: Ashwin Dedhia, Director
Information systems and information technology are integral components of every modern organization. Part of this relationship is the role IS and IT plays in the pursuit of a business’s strategy and long term goals.
Management needs information to run business. Better the system to get the information better the control, growth and profitability of the business. These were MIS. Today’s competitive business landscape makes it mandatory for organizations to develop systems that shall bring out information from the data collected during the business transactions. The collection of information needs to be near real time, dynamic, and analytical. Users should be capable of converting this information in different formats for faster interpretation and better decision making. This collectively is termed as BI.
Business Intelligence (BI)—that collection of technologies used to analyze data from different business systems in order to reveal meaningful insights about a company’s operations—is among CIOs’ top spending priorities, according to Merrill Lynch’s CIO Spending Survey. 1KEY BI tool, developed in INDIA by MAIA Intelligence, provides the best of the reporting capabilities.
MIS were used by a select few in the organization, due to the efforts involved in collecting data and preparation of summaries from the same. Use of Computers in the MIS process helped in speeding up the process and increased its reach. Then came the phase of BI, BI has been privilege of the TOP segment of the pyramid. The cost involved prohibited the expansion of BI to the Middle tier Business users. Operational BI is expected to do the task of making it available to masses, as they are the ones who need BI, more times in a day.
Posted on February 1st, 2008 by Ashwin Dedhia
Filed under: Business Intelligence, CIO Community, Emerging Trends
What is the objective of BI reports and how it is better than MIS?
@Riya, BI applications include the activities of Query and reporting, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) and analysis, Dashboards and scorecards and Alerting.
Business Intelligence (BI) is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analysing and providing access to data to help users make better business decisions.
Objective of BI system is to:
- Automatically loading data from the source systems into the Performance Management system
- Making information available quickly, which is automatically distributed to users across the organisation and in the field to make it available when and where it is needed.
- Representing information in many ways – on a dashboard, as traffic lights, in a table, on a graph, so that it is presented in the most suitable format for the intended audience.
- Allowing for unexpected results so they can be easily analysed and understood with user-friendly reporting tools, which can allow measures to be taken to avert problems from escalating.
- Giving control to users, if so desired, for their own reporting, so they have the ability to create reports when they need them reducing their dependency on others.
BI is a much broader concept rather than a technology. Having the right metrics in place, having a balanced score card in place, knowing what to measure within your organisation is part of that concept.
MIS however, traditionally focused on providing managers with structured, periodic reports and the information was primarily from accounting and transaction processing systems, but the systems did not provide interactive support to assist managers in decision making.