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Article: Business intelligence: Peter Simons reports on the latest developments in the fast-moving BI software industry and forecasts new trends in decision-support technology.(technical matters)
- Article from:
- Financial Management (UK)
- Article date:
- September 1, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA). This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The typical business intelligence (BI) architecture can be seen as having a stack of layers. The base usually comprises source data systems, from where data is processed by "extract, transform, load" (ETL) software into a data warehouse. Above that are the BI and application layers and then at the top there is the presentation or delivery layer, which can include executive dashboards, scorecards and other decision-making tools.
Software houses used to specialise in making applications for these different layers, which meant that businesses would assemble their own stacks using independent suppliers. So a company might have an SAP enterprise resource planning ...