Top 15 Business Intelligence Features and Terminologies (Glossary) of BI Software

Features of BI Software:
BI software is an integration of data sourcing, filtering, ranking and information presentation. Given below are a few features of the business intelligence software.
• Drill down/up
• Graphs, charts and trees with custom drill down
• Drill down of dimensions with previews of current and past derivations
• Exception conditional highlighting of cell level
• Pivot table
• Cross Tabs
• Custom calculations
• Query Wizard Expertise
• Layout Comments and Saving
• Analytical features like ranking, filtering, sorting, group by etc…
• Dashboards with KPI reports
• Web Portals with RSS feeds
• Interval Grouping on date field
• Distribution reports with XML Publishing
• Export reports in different formats (PDF, XLS, TXT, HTML etc.)

Terminologies / Glossary of widely used BI terms
Business Intelligence is a set of business improvement activities. Following are a few terminologies which are commonly used while dealing with various BI processes
• Ad-Hoc Query: A query consisting dynamically constructed SQL usually constructed by desktop-resident query tools. These cannot be determined prior to the moment the query is issued.
• Analytic applications: 'Turnkey' software solutions to specific data analysis of a particular business department like customer intelligence or market research.
• Business performance management (BPM): BPM helps to optimize the business process by focusing on business processes such as planning and forecasting. It helps businesses discover efficient use of their resources like business units, financial, human resource etc…
• Cross tab: A function used to combine and / or summarize data from various sources into a concise format for analysis or reporting.
• Data Dictionary: A catalog of all the data elements, databases, files and programs of a business system, containing their names, structures, and information about their usage.
• Data mining: Data mining relates to extracting data / information from a data set, usually by testing the validity of different ways of describing the data.
• Data warehouse: A data warehouse integrates operational data from various parts of the business organization and acts as sharable data storage.
• Drill down/up: A process of exploring detailed data used in creating a summary level of data collected during sourcing. The drill down process allows viewing less detailed aggregated information to more granular data.
• Enterprise Portal: The enterprise portal allows a non-technical user to browse the business intelligence objects like documents, reports, dimensions, etc…via the Web.
• Executive Information Systems (EIS): A set of tools which provide reports to the top-level executives in an organization. These have analytical and ad-hoc query applications which offer strong reporting and drill-down capabilities.
• Key performance indicators (KPI): KPI measures the quantifiable performance of an activity that is critical to the success of an organization. It depends on the objective of an organization hence, is different for each.
• Multidimensional analysis: A method of analyzing a business key indicator from different point of view. For example sales can be analyzed based on dimensions like geography or product. This multidimensional analysis of sales by geography or sales by product gives a wide preview of the business scenario.
• Online analytical processing (OLAP): It is an important feature of BI. It is a multidimensional analysis tool used in business reporting, data sourcing etc…
• Structured query language (SQL): A query language used to access data stored in relational database management systems.
Slice and Dice: A term used to describe a complex data analysis function provided by the BI tools.
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