Practical Business Intelligence

Learn to get the most out of your business data to optimize your business About This Book This book will enable and empower you to break free of the shackles of spreadsheets Learn to make informed decisions using the data at hand with this highly practical, comprehensive guide This book includes real-world use cases that teach you how analytics can be put to work to optimize your business Using a fictional transactional dataset in raw form, you'll work your way up to ultimately creating a fully-functional warehouse and a fleshed-out BI platform Who This Book Is For This book is for anyone who has wrangled with data to try to perform automated data analysis through visualizations for themselves or their customers. This highly-customized guide is for developers who know a bit about analytics but don't know how to make use of it in the field of business intelligence. What You Will Learn Create a BI environment that enables self-service reporting Understand SQL and the aggregation of data Develop a data model suitable for analytical reporting Connect a data warehouse to the analytic reporting tools Understand the specific benefits behind visualizations with D3.js, R, Tableau, QlikView, and Python Get to know the best practices to develop various reports and applications when using BI tools Explore the field of data analysis with all the data we will use for reporting In Detail Business Intelligence (BI) is at the crux of revolutionizing enterprise. Everyone wants to minimize losses and maximize profits. Thanks to Big Data and improved methodologies to analyze data, Data Analysts and Data Scientists are increasingly using data to make informed decisions. Just knowing how to analyze data is not enough, you need to start thinking how to use data as a business asset and then perform the right analysis to build an insightful BI solution. Efficient BI strives to achieve the automation of data for ease of reporting and analysis. Through this book, you will develop the ability to think along the right lines and use more than one tool to perform analysis depending on the needs of your business. We start off by preparing you for data analytics. We then move on to teach you a range of techniques to fetch important information from various databases, which can be used to optimize your business. The book aims to provide a full end-to-end solution for an environment setup that can help you make informed business decisions and deliver efficient and automated BI solutions to any company. It is a complete guide for implementing Business intelligence with the help of the most powerful tools like D3.js, R, Tableau, Qlikview and Python that are available on the market. Style and approach Packed with real-world examples, this pragmatic guide helps you polish your data and make informed decisions for your business. We cover both business and data analysis perspectives, blending theory and practical hands-on work so that you perceive data as a business asset.

Design, Build, and Manage High-Value BI Solutions with SQL Server 2005 In this book, two of Microsoft’s leading consultants illustrate how to use SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence (BI) technologies to solve real-world problems in markets ranging from retail and finance to healthcare. Drawing on extensive personal experience with Microsoft’s strategic customers, John C. Hancock and Roger Toren offer unprecedented insight into BI systems design and step-by-step best practices for implementation, deployment, and management. Hancock and Toren introduce practical BI concepts and terminology and provide a concise primer on the Microsoft BI platform. Next, they turn to the heart of the book–constructing solutions. Each chapter-length case study begins with the customer’s business goals, and then guides you through detailed data modeling. The case studies show how to avoid the pitfalls that derail many BI projects. You’ll translate each model into a working system and learn how to deploy it into production, maintenance, and efficient operation. Whether you’re a decision-maker, architect, developer, or DBA, this book brings together all the knowledge you’ll need to derive maximum business value from any BI project. • Leverage SQL Server 2005 databases, Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services • Build data warehouses and extend them to support very large databases • Design effective Analysis Services databases • Ensure the superior data quality your BI system needs • Construct advanced enterprise scorecard applications • Use data mining to segment customers, cross-sell, and increase the value of each transaction • Design real-time BI applications • Get hands-on practice with SQL Server 2005’s BI toolset

Learn the fundamental aspects of the business statistics, data mining, and machine learning techniques required to understand the huge amount of data generated by your organization. This book explains practical business analytics through examples, covers the steps involved in using it correctly, and shows you the context in which a particular technique does not make sense. Further, Practical Business Analytics using R helps you understand specific issues faced by organizations and how the solutions to these issues can be facilitated by business analytics. This book will discuss and explore the following through examples and case studies: An introduction to R: data management and R functions The architecture, framework, and life cycle of a business analytics project Descriptive analytics using R: descriptive statistics and data cleaning Data mining: classification, association rules, and clustering Predictive analytics: simple regression, multiple regression, and logistic regression This book includes case studies on important business analytic techniques, such as classification, association, clustering, and regression. The R language is the statistical tool used to demonstrate the concepts throughout the book. What You Will Learn • Write R programs to handle data • Build analytical models and draw useful inferences from them • Discover the basic concepts of data mining and machine learning • Carry out predictive modeling • Define a business issue as an analytical problem Who This Book Is For Beginners who want to understand and learn the fundamentals of analytics using R. Students, managers, executives, strategy and planning professionals, software professionals, and BI/DW professionals.

Aligning business intelligence (BI) infrastructure with strategy processes not only improves your organization's ability to respond to change, but also adds significant value to your BI infrastructure and development investments. Until now, there has been a need for a comprehensive book on business analysis for BI that starts with a macro view and

Business Intelligence (BI) is a solution to modern business problems. This book discusses the relationship between BI and Human Resource Management (HRM). In addition, it discusses how BI can be used as a strategic decision-making tool for the sustainable growth of an organization or business. BI helps organizations generate interactive reports with clear and reliable data for making numerous business decisions. This book covers topics spanning the important areas of BI in the context of HRM. It gives an overview of the aspects, tools, and techniques of BI and how it can assist HRM in creating a successful future for organizations. Some of the tools and techniques discussed in the book are analysis, data preparation, BI-testing, implementation, and optimization on GR and management disciplines. It will include a chapter on text mining as well as a section of case studies for practical use. This book will be useful for business professionals, including but not limited to, HR professionals, and budding business students.

Practical Business Analytics Using SAS: A Hands-on Guide shows SAS users and businesspeople how to analyze data effectively in real-life business scenarios. The book begins with an introduction to analytics, analytical tools, and SAS programming. The authors—both SAS, statistics, analytics, and big data experts—first show how SAS is used in business, and then how to get started programming in SAS by importing data and learning how to manipulate it. Besides illustrating SAS basic functions, you will see how each function can be used to get the information you need to improve business performance. Each chapter offers hands-on exercises drawn from real business situations. The book then provides an overview of statistics, as well as instruction on exploring data, preparing it for analysis, and testing hypotheses. You will learn how to use SAS to perform analytics and model using both basic and advanced techniques like multiple regression, logistic regression, and time series analysis, among other topics. The book concludes with a chapter on analyzing big data. Illustrations from banking and other industries make the principles and methods come to life. Readers will find just enough theory to understand the practical examples and case studies, which cover all industries. Written for a corporate IT and programming audience that wants to upgrade skills or enter the analytics field, this book includes: More than 200 examples and exercises, including code and datasets for practice. Relevant examples for all industries. Case studies that show how to use SAS analytics to identify opportunities, solve complicated problems, and chart a course. Practical Business Analytics Using SAS: A Hands-on Guide gives you the tools you need to gain insight into the data at your fingertips, predict business conditions for better planning, and make excellent decisions. Whether you are in retail, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, government, or any other industry, this book will help your organization increase revenue, drive down costs, improve marketing, and satisfy customers better than ever before.

One day a man walked into Asgard Inc. and changed the company forever. Unlike anyone who came before, he remembered and understood data as naturally as a fish swims in water. The CEO was shocked at how well the man knew the company. He started posing questions to this man. Who are my best customers? Why is this product struggling? Where is my greatest growth happening? The man answered these and more. Using his understanding of data, he identified key new markets, he discovered the best places to invest capital, and he even predicted the future. Overnight Asgard Inc. changed. Where before the CEO relied on limited information and gut feelings, now true knowledge guided his actions. The CEO took the man's hand in gratitude and asked, "Who are you?" and he replied, "I am Business Intelligence." Business Intelligence(BI) is shrouded in mystery for a lot of us but it doesn't need to stay that way. Business Intelligence in Plain Language is a systematic exploration of this complicated tool. I'll teach you about what it does, how it works, and most importantly how you can benefit from it. In this book you will learn about: Business Intelligence Data Mining Data Warehousing Data Discovery Big Data Outlier Detection Pattern Recognition Predictive Modeling Data Transformation and much more This book is your practical guide to understanding and implementing Business Intelligence.

Geared toward IT management and business executives seeking to excel in business intelligence initiatives, this practical guide explores creating business alignment strategies that help prioritize business requirements, build organizational and cultural strategies, increase IT efficiency, and promote user adoption. Business intelligence, together with business analytics and performance management, eliminates information overload by organizing the massive amounts of information available in the modern enterprise. Addressing the challenges of business intelligence operations, this resource supports the goal of better business decision making and identifying unrealized opportunities. Each chapter includes a checklist of recommended approaches and a strategy overview template.