This document discusses information capture and business intelligence analysis beyond just structured data from core transaction systems. It outlines various internal and external sources of both structured and unstructured data for strategic, tactical and operational intelligence. Challenges with collecting and analyzing unstructured data from sources like social media are also examined.

1. Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information
Division of Knowledge Management
Business Intelligence (Assignment 1)
Information capture - other than structured data from core transactional processing systems, BI Analysis
and Intelligence Proposition
Submitted By
THANGAVELU MUTHU KUMAAR (G1101765E)
BALASUBRAMANIAN DIVYA (G1101736H)
SELVARAJU NIRMALA (G1101760J)

2. The changing nature of communication channels in enterprises, new ways of technology integration with
traditional processing, affordability of simple programming devices or interfaces like QR codes, bar codes,
RFID and bio metrics, robustness of wireless network infrastructure and massive capabilities of data centres
have facilitated to the growth of this information era. It is a challenging task to collect the information from
multiple sources of enterprises, interpret with appropriate context to transform it into knowledge to help in
decision making. The distinct steps described by Gilad and Gilad (1985) provides a best systems approach and
help in running through the goal of intelligence transformation from information which is other than the
traditional internal processing data (like sentiments and opinions expressed in internet and social media, social
network analysis, SME reports, internal audit reports, market research, news agencies, consultant and analyst
reports). These data are typically from external sources existing in structured and unstructured data. Similar kind
of web 2.0 interaction data in enterprise portals, Enterprise Applications usage, internal social network analysis,
chats and Expert information can be internal sources which have not been looked upon in most organizations
presently. They tend to be more in unstructured forms as they are directly contributed by people as in web 2.0.
Information to Intelligence Mapping with BI Process:
The degree of intelligence derived by the enterprises by acting upon accessible information with BI processes
determines the level of optimum usage of the existing resources and an understanding of their stands in the
market place which guides organizations in scaling their success.
Figure 1: Information to Intelligence Mapping (Gilad and Gilad, 1985)
Collection:
Sources and Types of Information:
The business management depends on BI solutions, to make delicate decisions, as well as to modify or adjust
the business strategies and business process and to achieve competitive advantage and improve business
operation and profitability.

3. The reasons why organisations depend on information are, to carry out strategic planning, intelligent recording
and relaying, controlling and monitoring, measuring and decision-making.
Information needs are clearly different at different levels of management - the strategic, tactical, and operative
levels (Uusi-Rauva, 1994).
Operative Intelligence requires more of internal information that is detailed, specific and historical
(McGonagle and Vella, 1996). This information comes mostly from core transactional systems and it is mostly
structured in nature. These are used for operations monitoring, setting standards for processes, quality control
and production related activities. Some of the sources of internal structured information are from functional and
integrative technology services like Radio frequency (RF) technologies, Computer-aided design (CAD) systems,
Demand forecasting management (DFM), Collaborative planning, forecasting, and replenishment (CFRP)
systems, Manufacturing execution systems (MES), Order management systems (OMS), Product data
management (PDM) systems, Supply chain event management (SCEM) systems, Geo-coded Service tracking
systems, Transportation management systems (TMS), Warehouse management systems (WMS) , Enterprise
resource planning (ERP) systems, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) systems, Enterprise Knowledge
Portal (EKP) Systems, Customer/supplier relationship management (CRM/SRM), Supply chain planning (SCP)
systems (Krmac EV, 2011) .
Strategic intelligence is often derived from movement of market, competitors and customers. They help the
organization to plan their business strategies – market expansions, new product launch, benchmarking standards,
policy restructuring, mergers and acquisitions. These sources of information are mostly external to the
organization and more of broad, integrated and upcoming in nature (McGonagle and Vella, 1996). They are
obtained from market research and consulting firms like Mckinsey, Nielsen, Ipsos, Ernst and Young and similar
others. They may be structured or unstructured. Also this information can be obtained from internet with web
crawlers to capture the relevant customer trends and sentiments, economic and financial news, and competitor’s
innovation, branding and marketing strategies. This information from new s feeds, user comments on social
media is unstructured where there is a high reliance on text and context mining techniques to extract the useful
information to transform into intelligence.
Tactical Intelligence is a balance between strategic and operational moves with slightly more internal sources
than external. These sources are used to manage risks in the operational monitoring stage such as demand
forecasting, logistics optimization, process improvement, economies of scale. These sources also include
significant sources of external conditions like weather patterns or environmental conditions in the raw materials
supplier region, political conditions in the operating regions and supply demand management with sales
channels which can exist in unstructured as well as structured forms
The data from different kind of information systems other than core transactional processing systems like
Executive Support Systems helping the senior management with more external and less internal information
sources (highly structured with appropriate returns) to base their strategic decisions, Management information
systems helping in aligning information about people, process and technology to business, typically internal
(more structured and less unstructured forms), Decision-support systems helping management make decisions
in uncertainty about the possible outcomes for which sources can be external or internal existing in mostly
structured information rather than unstructured , Knowledge Management Systems helping businesses create
and share information which has its sources internal and is typically unstructured, Office Automation Systems
trying to improve the productivity of employees who need to process data and information and they are again
internal sources which are but structured (Mahesh Raisinghani, 2004).

4. The various internal and sources for an enterprise analyzed with Business Information Cube Framework
(Hannula & Pirttimäki 2004) are listed down as in table 1 (Appendix)
This information can further be analyzed based on their form of existence (Structured and unstructured) with the
framework of Hervonen (2004) for information classification.
Evaluation:
Why Organizations limit themselves to the internal structured Information:
There is a well known dark-side to the information technology and the communication revolution; those would
be information overload and attention fragmentation. These factors are strongly considered as afflictions by the
senior executives because they need uninterrupted time to assess and process the information collected.
Research conducted on various disciplines seems to prove that the performance of an individual is influenced
with the amount of information they receive up to a certain saturation point; beyond that point the performance
rapidly declines.
Figure 2. Information overload as inverted U-Curve.
Qualities of Information:
Despite the amount of information, the nature of the information also contributes to the ‘overload’ attribute of
the information. The nature of the information includes: Level of ambiguity of the information, Level of novelty
of the information, complexity, intensity, conciseness, consistency, comprehensibility. In addition to this there
are other dimensions the quality of information should have that determines its usefulness to the organization -
Inherent qualities and the pragmatic qualities. The inherent quality is the correctness of the data or the
information, whereas the pragmatic quality is the relevancy of the data to the context of the organization and its
need for that information.
Though the technology in present day makes a wide range of information accessible, it is important to analyse
the business environment extensively to know what is and what is not required at that point of time (Choo,
2002). After selecting the right information, there is a need to assess the existing information gap and map how
the new information transformed into intelligence can help in decision support.
Storage, Analysis and Dissemination:
The evaluated data is moved to data warehouse and is then used to analyze and synthesize the information from
the many different sources, emulate on its implications to the organizations, apply guesses and judgements, and
make strategic decisions to make best use of it.
The reporting environment of a BI tool helps us to visualize the data typically into Spreadsheets with Query,
reporting and data visualization tools and OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) with increasingly popular

5. Data, Text, Sentiment, Opinion and Web mining components. Powell (1996) calls the refinement process a BI
value chain which is cyclical and ongoing in nature
Real time BI analysis, mobile and cloud based BI solutions can also help in solving many operational
challenges. For example, this helped British Petroleum in their innovative ways of Oil Exploration, Production,
Processing initiatives and in transforming their conventional operations to sustain their competitive edge.
o Oil Rigs  Digital Oil Platforms - 3D and 4D Seismic imaging, Augmented Reality based simulation
o Oil Recovery  Optimized Oil Recovery and Refining - Real time monitoring of mature fields
Typical BI applications
In general, BI solutions help in breaking the Information Silos spanning geographies - within and across internal
department systems (Legacy mainframes, ERP, CRM), Supplier systems and Customer systems. Some of the
specific examples are as follows
Logistics Optimization: Achieving a cost-effective means of transport. (Business intelligence software
can facilitate a fast and easy selection of the best means of transport considering a vast number of
factors in selecting the means of transport are physical characteristics of the load, the number of loads
to be moved, the distance to be covered, the required speed of movement, the required proof of
delivery, cost of building/dismantling loads, packaging costs, space requirements, interface with other
storage, transport and handling systems and housekeeping issues) and considering also historic data
and past experience.)
Operational standard and Quality maintenance: Evaluating the operations performed in the
company (generating reports), evaluating strategic factors (internal and external) and identifying
patterns of business and operational behaviour (using data mining techniques).Implement dashboards
and scoreboards so that executives and supervisors can quickly recognize operational exceptions or key
performance indicators (KPI) that fall outside of accepted ranges. Some of the important KPIs could be
planning accuracy, capacity utilization, resource utilization, load balancing, route utilization,
scheduling accuracy, vehicle availability, vehicle loading time, average transit time, cost of
transportation per ton, on time vehicle arrival, vehicle unloading time, order receipt accuracy,
percentage of goods damaged, total order delivery time, on time deliveries, goods delivery rate,
transportation costs and others.
Challenges in the intelligence transformation:
Technology acceptance at different levels of users, Human Information Behaviour in information consumption,
Security considerations and access to information, Difficulty in extracting data from internet with Natural
Language Processing, word sense disambiguation, costs and time in implementing cross organizational
infrastructure and rapid obsolescence of technology are some of the key challenges in collecting and
transforming the information and which sometimes prevents the organizations in realizing the true value of
Business Intelligence Solutions.

6. References:
Mahesh Raisinghani (2004), Business intelligence in the digital economy: opportunities, limitations, and risks,
Hershey PA : Idea Group Pub., c2004
Gilad, B. and Gilad, T. (1985), A Systems Approach to Business Intelligence. Business Horizons. Vol. 28, No. 5,
pp. 65-70
Krmac Evelin Vatovec (2011), Intelligent Value Chain Networks: Business Intelligence and Other ICT Tools and
Technologies in Supply/Demand Chains, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Maritime Studies and Transport
McGonagle, J. J. and Vella, C. M. (1996), A New Archetype for Competitive Intelligence. Quorum Books,
Westport, CT.
Choo, C. W. (2002), Information Management for the Intelligent Organization: The Art of Scanning the
Environment. 3rd Edition. Information Today, Medford, NJ.
Hannula, M. & Pirttimäki, V (2004), A Cube of Business Information. The SCIP 04 Annual International
Conference & Exhibit, March 22 – 25, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Gilad, B. and Herring, J. P. (2004), The Art and Science of Business Intelligence Analysis. Part A: Business
Intelligence Theory, Principles, Practices, and Uses. JAI Press, Greenwich, CT, pp. 159-180.

7. Appendix
Type Qualitative Quantitative
Source Internal External Internal External
Subject
Internal Information , Social network data, Process Audit Agency/ Analysts/
Manufacturing and Agency/ Analysts/ Reports, Quality Research reports,
Quality control Research reports, Management/ Investment hedging
Systems and University/ Research Assurance reports, Market
maintenance logs, databases, Reports, share / Sales
employee surveys, government agency Production volume fluctuation
Enterprise 2.0 data, policy data, Scientific Reports, Reports reports
Intellectual Property publications, Social on liquidity, cash
Audit Reports, Media, promotional flow and
Information Security campaigns , trade investments,
Audit, Customer events, social financial
service/ Call centre contracts, Patent statements,
reports, Records of the Applications, Marketing, Sales,
people employed by environmental, Organic growth
the business, Tacit health & safety and market value
knowledge and regulation and reports,
practices of SMEs employment laws Data on the costs
captured in meetings, associated with
discussions business
processes
External Infrastructure and Newsfeeds, Bank/ financial Market Research
equipment Lease Government reports, institutions Agency/ Analysts/
reports, Third party Supplier, Partners, transactional Research reports
expert (Consulting Distributors, Retailer reports, Insurance about competitors
firms) audit/ advisory surveys and reports, transactional and market, World
services, General Agency/ Analysts/ reports, Supplier, Bank/IMF/ News
Broking services Research reports Retailer, Partners, Agency like
reports, Sustainability about competitors Distributors Bloomberg
compliance reports, and market, Press transactional Economic
releases, Bench reports, Electronic indicators data,
marking standards of broking services Meteorological data
competitors reports
Table 1. Business Information Cube Framework
Fig: 3 Business Information Classification (adapted from Hervonen, 2004).