In class this week, we had a detailed discussion regarding metrics vs KPIs. This is very important to understand the difference in business intelligence to understand what to show managers in your dashboards, reports, and other business intelligence analytics.

According to http://itsm.certification.info/metrics.html,

"A metric is any standard of measurement - number of incidents logged, average time to log incident, percentage incidents resolved within agreed service level etc.
A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a metric that you have chosen that will give an indication of your performance and can be used as a driver for improvement. In general it's preferred to just chose a few KPIs (say 3 or 4) to focus on.


The point is this: a metric is just a measurement. A KPI is an indicator (a metric) that you have chosen, and agreed with your partners (whether internal to IT or with customers), that will determine whether you are meeting your critical success factors (CSF)."

Based on these definitions and the ones discussed in class, metrics are numerical numbers and KPIs use the metrics to measure the overall performance of  the company at that given time. I have used KPIs in my career with SQL Server 2008 and they have been an important part of any report or dashboard that will be targeted towards Upper management. These KPIs will give them an understanding of whether or not everything is performing well. If there is a problem, they can perform data analysis in cubes, pivot tables, or other tools to drill down into the data better.

Below is an example of an executive dashboard that shows top level managers the current performance. In this specific dashboard, there are multiple gauges. I think gauges have their place in dashboards, but it seems like this dashboard overuses the amount of gauges to put on one page, but that is not too important. I think that the color scheme is very useful to let managers know immediately where there are problems at. The red, green, and yellow scheme does not require a legend to understand.

Source: http://www.dashboardspy.com/img/hospital-executive-dashboard-kpi.jpg

I am very interested in continuing to learn, develop, and deploy dashboards, reports, and analytical tools in my business intelligence career.

The MIS 587 Business Intelligence course seems very interesting and important for my future career. I have currently been working with SQL Server 2008. I am looking forward to learning more about Data warehousing with Terradata, since I have not used this tool before, and using Social Media to influence business decisions.

Since my concentration will be in BI, I decided to do some research to understand what business intelligence consists of. According to Wikipedia:

"Business intelligence (BI) mainly refers to computer-based techniques used in identifying, extracting,^{[clarification needed]} and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments, or by associated costs and incomes.^[1]
BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining and predictive analytics."

Based on this definition, data is the primary component that is needed to drive business intelligence. I have worked on many projects that use the ETL (extract, transform, load) procedure to create various databases or data warehouses. Below is an image that illustrates the ETL procedure along with how to create Business intelligence from it.

  

Source: http://www.avanco.com/sol_business_intel.html

From this course, I am hoping to add new tools and procedures to my skill set so that I can use business intelligence to help a future company.