At its core, the business intelligence is both a set of processes and technologies aimed at improving strategic and operational decision making by leveraging enterprise data. By bringing together data from disparate sources, our system will offer an enterprise view of the business.

The component BI tools will be partitioned into three distinct categories:

• Data consolidation tools (Back-end technologies)

These tools ensure that a BI system operates over high quality data, and are critical for the transportation of data into data marts and/or data warehouses. Equally important they are also integral to the transformation of various data types into usable formats.

• Presentation/Reporting Tools

These tools will make use of spreadsheets alongside rich graphical interfaces for the usual presentation of data and analysis in a friendly intuitive manner. Also included will be executive oriented reporting tools (dashboards and scorecards) that will pull data from different sources, providing a snapshot of the enterprise’s performance and measure performance against strategic targets. The ability to send alerts or notifications (e-mails) when critical changes occur in business are incorporated into the tools (for example an automatic e-mail sent out when a matric is outside normal range).