Imagine that you are hired as a Chief Information Officer (CIO) of a quickly growing retail chain with an online presence. You have growing transactional databases but want to build a business intelligence infrastructure. You also have various departments within your company with databases such as marketing, customer service, accounts payable, sales, and accounts receivable.
What would your proposed business intelligence infrastructure consist of? Justify your decisions.
As CIO of the retail chain which has an extensive online presence, it is needed to build business intelligence infrastructure to make use of the transaction data retrieved from various departments and convert it into meaningful information for better use of the departments. My proposed infrastructure for the business intelligence should consist of the ability to report the working capital requirements of the organization automatically. It should be able to make live calculations for the operational efficiency of the organization. Moreover, the customer satisfaction index can be used for reporting the information to the department of marketing. Furthermore, various marketing, financial, and operational data reports can be used by generated on an automatic basis as based on the integration of various databases. Intelligence should be collected which would consist of understanding and identifying the problem areas arising in the company and by answering the questions regarding why, where and what the problem has arisen and what would be its consequences. It can also be done with the use of the MIS systems which uses a wide variety of detailed information which aids in the identification of problems through various system reports (Stair & Reynolds, 2017).
The next stage is the design stage in which the individual designs of possible solutions are developed. Next is the choice stage, which consists of the choosing of the best alternative. A complex decision system can be used for the development of extensive data on various alternatives or various data analysis tools for accounting for the costs, opportunities, and consequences. After this stage is the implementation stage in which the decision maker has to choose an alternative and put it to use. Reporting systems can be used for the delivering of routine reporting on the solution progress. A complaint launch and customer communications system should be established. It needs to have a platform for marketing as well. The business intelligence platform should also include expenses and receivables of the company. An income management system can also be established within it. Other than these general segments, the business intelligence infrastructure would also need.
Transaction processing systems: The transaction processing system would include the transaction data of various departments. It can include the sales, marketing, and finance departments transaction processing systems at the most general level (O’Brien, 2004).
Data modeling system: This is one exercise which would aid in the determination of which data from the transactional system is required for business intelligence. The hierarchy and format and relationship of the data and between the data from various sources are designed and established.
Extract Transform Load Process is needed for the collection of the needed data from various disparate systems from all the departments and is loaded in a common place for analysis which is known as the Data Warehouse.
Data Warehouse: Data warehouse is the segment in which all of the transaction data are loaded and transformed for the achievement of cross-functional analysis, summaries and reporting on a cadence.
Business Intelligence Hardware: This is needed as it must be scalable and needs high maintenance of performance levels. For this, investment is needed for acquiring robust Business Intelligence hardware systems like the cloud architecture, servers, databases, and visualization software licenses.
These are some of the proposed recommendations for the business intelligence infrastructure which would be appropriate for the growth of the retail chain with an extensive online presence. The growing databases would be used for the building of the infrastructure. The departments of marketing, finance, accounts, and sales would be used for data mining and the building of the infrastructure of the business intelligence system (Adamantios, 2012).
References
Adamantios, K. (2012). Management Information Systems for Enterprise Applications: Business Issues, Research and Solutions: Business Issues, Research and Solutions. IGI Global.
O’Brien. (2004). Introduction To Information Systems. Tata McGraw-Hill Education.
Stair, R., & Reynolds, G. (2017). Fundamentals of Information Systems (9 ed.). Cengage Learnings.
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