Proven Portals: Best Practices for Planning, Designing, and Developing Enterprise Portals

Understanding Operations: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing

Businesses, government agencies, and other organizations typically create information systems to optimize specific operations, such as accounting, CRM, and ERP. These systems are designed to allow rapid access to specific information, such as the status of an invoice, a customer record, or the inventory level of a specific component. They are not designed to provide the high-level, integrated views that decision makers need to get a pulse on the organization. For example, a financial analyst studying cash flow may need to know the average outstanding invoice by month and by sales region for the past twelve months, and a product manager will likely monitor the average daily inventory ...