MS BI for Time Series Analysis, Deviation Analysis, Regression Analysis, Correlation Analysis and Distribution Analysis

Few questions are very important to get answered before anyone dives into the sea of business intelligence. You would find many professionals who cannot make out the difference between reporting data and business intelligence. I recently met one senior professional having approx 14 years of experience, and he was not clear of what is a data warehouse. He used to consider anything that stores data in the form of dimension and facts tables is a data warehouse, which is completely incorrect. The biggest drawback of this lack of understanding is that one cannot understand the life-cycle of how an organization gets BI ready.

I define BI readiness in 4 steps : Data Intelligence, Reporting Intelligence, Integration Intelligence, Business Intelligence. You can read more about this in my article titled "Select a BI software with full knowledge of what it does".

Now say that you understand the importance and concept of gaining organizational data maturity to harvest Business Intelligence. But the next question is that if an organization wants to get BI ready, do they need to open up a new data center or a few servers running on memory steroids? Cloud is a growing trend for infrastructure elasticity, and Microsoft is also gearing up fast on Azure platform. But again the question is, are you ready for Cloud BI?

Migrating or developing BI solutions on the cloud needs an assessment of your existing line of business systems. I have authored another article titled "5 cloud BI considerations for a successful rollout", which can be read to gain a little deeper insight into this topic.

Finally when your understanding of BI and your infra requirements to host the same are resolved, one another and most important question would hit you - How to recognize / build a true BI software / solution ? Every business has Sales, WorkForce, Products, Business Operations and other Business As Usual constituents. If you have ever studied statistics and statistical methods which are used for analysis by senior business management to analyze different aspects of the business, you would have heard of analytical methods like Time Series Analysis, Deviation Analysis, Regression Analysis, Correlation Analysis, Distribution Analysis and more. These are high level categories of analytical methods and needs a mathematical and scientific approach to analyze and visualize data.

Based on the analytical capabilities of your BI solution, you can assess its BI value. To understand and assess any BI tool you should consider to assess these methods, and to read more about how to analyze any BI tool / software, you can read my article titled "Business Intelligence tools Analyzed" where I have explained four essential analysis features for BI solution. Once you understand what these analysis methods are, you can try to figure out features in MS BI which can help you build these forms of analysis, and then you can derive if MS BI is a powerful BI solution development platform.

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