Ecommerce Business Intelligence Solutions Software
A Home Business Article Contributed by Sharon Hill
What is Ecommerce Business Intelligence Software?
The first question, prior to looking into the relevant ecommerce software, of course, is "What is Business Intelligence? " It's the process by which a company makes wise use of gathered data to make business decisions whose purpose is to realize a competitive advantage.
Ecommerce Business Intelligence Software Steps
There are five elements of a business intelligence process: data sourcing, data analysis, situation awareness, realization of risk and decision support.
Data sourcing refers to the gathering of data from multiple resources - word processing documents, scanners, digital cameras, Internet researches, database queries and so forth. The data gathered may include text, photos, sounds, emails, graphs and tables, and URLs.
The next step, data analysis, also referred to as data mining, involves the collation and organization of the raw material provided by the data sourcing into structured formats that allow for competitive business use. You may engage in statistical analysis, probability theories or even artificial intelligence to study current trends and predict future ones.
Situation awareness is simply the sorting of the data wheat from the data chaff. At this point you look at the analyses provided by your data analysis software and decide which is useful for your ecommerce business decisions.
Realization of risk is the step during which you decide on a plan of action. You look at your various ecommerce business options, a glimpse of which has been provided by your situation awareness and data software, and make your best educated guess about your next plan of action.
Decision support ecommerce software helps you know what's going on in your industry - helps keep you ahead of the competitive game instead, hopefully, of always putting out competitive fires.
Ecommerce Business Intelligence Software Vendors
One firm, the global Business Objects, www.businessobjects.com, offers ecommerce software for all business intelligence stages. Business Objects 6.5 offers reporting, analysis and performance management programs; Data Integrator 6.5 offers the latest in data analysis; while Crystal Version 10 is their newest report generation ecommerce software suite.
Claiming to be the world leader in ecommerce business intelligence and performance planning software, Cognos sells its programs directly or through over 3000 global vendors and resellers. Its business intelligence products including ReportNet for business and production reporting, PowerPlay for data analysis, Cognos Visualizer offers data analysis programming. Cognos DecisionStream brings together your disparate data for organized reports.
It's NoticeCast software program offers immediate knowledge of critical ecommerce business events, allowing you a shortened and timely response to critical information pieces.
Other business intelligence program vendors include Hyperion (who has purchased Brio) and offers Hyperion Intelligence, Hyperion SQR and Hyperion Performance Suite. MicroStrategy, building itself as the world's only industrial strength business intelligence architecture, offers the complete MicroStrategy 7i platform of business intelligence software products.
To keep abreast of the various aspects of ecommerce software, such as business intelligence, integration and analytics, log onto DM Review Magazine at www.dmreview.com . The site, now in its 14th year offers informative, thought-provoking, up-to-the-minute technological business program information.
