Introduction to Business Intelligence

During the past few years, fast changes in the economic environment and massive technological developments in the field of information technology have constituted challenges for many companies. The growing capabilities to collect and store loads of internal and external data make it more and more difficult for a business's management to find the really important pieces of information. This situation of information overload is tackeled by a variety of analytic concepts and tools which can be subsumed under the opalescent term of "Business Intelligence". This book introduces these different concepts and then presents the most important tools such as data warehouses and data marts, online analytical processing, data mining, and reporting. The book aims at a not information technology focussed kind of presentation and evaluates the relevance of the tools introduced for companies' daily operations. Therefore it adresses economists and managers (even of small and medium enterprises) who want to get a guided overview of the field of Business Intelligence as well as students of business administrations and of business information systems.