Business Intelligence and the Cloud: Strategic Implementation Guide

PART THREE

Business Intelligence and the Cloud

In Parts One and Two, the foundation was laid for understanding how to extract the maximum benefit from cloud computing. Part One provided a brief historical review and extensive definitions. Part Two covered the economic and strategic concepts necessary to understand cloud computing and how business intelligence (BI) fits. Now we move on to discussing BI and how it is enhanced by cloud computing. This includes reviewing the topics of Big Data and mobile computing.

Gartner's IT glossary defines business intelligence as “an umbrella term that includes the applications, infrastructure and tools, and best practices that enable access to and analysis of information to improve and optimize decisions and performance.”¹ This glossary defines business analytics as “solutions used to build analysis models and simulations to create scenarios, understand realities and predict future states. Business analytics includes data mining, predictive analytics, applied analytics and statistics, and is delivered as an application suitable for a business user.”²

These definitions will be incorporated into cloud strategy in Part Three as we deal with these issues:

• What is business intelligence, what is business analytics, and what is the difference?
• How does Big Data affect BI?
• What is the intersection of BI and mobile computing?

NOTES

1. Gartner, “Business Intelligence,” IT Glossary, www.gartner.com/it-glossary/business-intelligence-bi.

2. Gartner, “Business ...