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“Where do they live? The racers, I mean. Where are they? Are they
clustered geographically? I mean, we don’t want to send the name of a trainer
in Minneapolis to someone living in San Diego.”
“Well, we could ask them for their address when they sign up for the event?”
“Yeah, maybe, justify it by saying we need it for some sort of map we could dis-
play. They might like that. But I hate to ask them for anything that distracts them from
the races.”
“We could use their connection IP addresses. That would tell us where the bikes
are that they’re using . . . might not be where they live, though.”
“I don’t mean where they sleep; I mean where they work out. That would do.”
“What if they’re traveling?”
“I don’t care . . . most people won’t be. I’m not quite sure what I want, and I know
that drives you crazy.”
“It does for operational things; it’s typical for BI.”
“What’s BI?”
“Business intelligence. Data analysis, where you don’t know the
second question to ask until you see the answer to the first one.”
“Yeah. That’s it exactly! That’s where I am right now.”
“Suppose we start with this. I’ll sample a bunch of our data, maybe
5,000 racers, and locate them with the connection IP. Then I’ll give it to
you in an Excel pivot table.”
“Yeah, so what?”
“Data analysis, “Well, then you can look at it by state, city, and ZIP code and see what
where you don’t we’ve got.”
know the second “How come you’re not asking me for budget?”
“I might, but this part is easy. We’ve got the data, and I can deliver it with
question to ask until Excel. And I’ve got just one user: you. So I don’t have to make the UI easy, write
you see the answer documentation, develop procedures, etcetera. Besides, you’re a pretty smart user.”
to the first one.” “Thanks for the praise … ”
Image source: jiris/Fotolia “On the other hand, if you take off with this in some crazy way and you want to
use it to build something for users or do some serious data mining, set up a data mart,
then you’ll need to come up with some money for my budget.”

STUdy QUeSTIonS

Q9-1 How do organizations use business intelligence (BI)
systems?
Q9-2 What are the three primary activities in the BI process?

Q9-3 How do organizations use data warehouses and data marts
to acquire data?
Q9-4 How do organizations use reporting applications?
Q9-5 How do organizations use data mining applications?

Q9-6 How do organizations use BigData applications?
Q9-7 What is the role of knowledge management systems?
Q9-8 What are the alternatives for publishing BI?
Q9-9 2026?
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