Business Intelligence (BI)

Business Intelligence is the data warehousing and reporting. Where the original concept of data warehousing is primarily concerned with the integration of vast amounts of data across multiple business systems, business intelligence technologies help to gather, analyze, and provide access to that integrated store of data in order to make informed strategic business decisions.
Business intelligence technologies to track business performance, detect trends, and produce accurate forecasts about the future, businesses hope to turn their wealth of corporate data into a competitive advantage. Where strategic business decisions 100 years ago were largely made by guesswork, business intelligence systems help to eliminate the guesswork by providing much more insight into past performance and more accurate predictions of the future conditions. This high-quality information can actually be targeted at any level of an organization, although most use cases involve upper management.
 
The Report Center : The Report Center site provides a central location for business-intelligence-related information. It contains special document libraries for storing reports, lists, and connections to external data sources.


Excel Services: Excel Services provides to store an Excel workbook on a server and publish any part of that workbook on a Web page. Users need only a browser to view and interact with the live data. The workbook is published on the Web page by using the Excel Web Access (EWA) Web Part.
 
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) : A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a visual cue that communicates the amount of progress made toward a goal. KPIs are valuable for teams, managers, and businesses to evaluate quickly the progress made against measurable goals.
 
Connections to external data sources : In addition to using external data sources in Excel workbooks, you can use data from other business applications, such as SAP and Siebel, in SharePoint lists, pages, and Web Parts.
 
Filter Web Parts : Filters allows display only the subset of data that user interested in viewing. For example, a data set can contain ten years' record's of multiple products for the entire country/city. By using filters, user can display something more meaningful, such as only one sales region, only one product, or only the current year.
 
Dashboards : Dashboards are tools that are used to communicate status and to drive action. An Office SharePoint Server 2007 dashboard is a Web page template that allows you to assemble and display information from disparate sources such as reports, charts, metrics, and key performance indicators.