COGNIZANT TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS: GROWTH AND TRANSFORMATION OF ITS DATA WAREHOUSING AND BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE DIVISION RESEARCH NOTE

摘要

While the term Business Intelligence is relatively new, computer-based business intelligence systems appeared, in one guise or the other, close to forty years ago. BI, as a term, replaced decision support, executive information systems, and management information systems (Thomsen, 2003). Business Intelligence (BI) as a term was coined in the early 1990s by Howard Dressner, then an analyst at the Gartner Group. BI is now widely used, especially in the world of practice, to describe analytic applications. Business intelligence systems combine operational data with analytical tools to present complex and competitive information to planners and decision makers and is used to understand the capabilities available in the firm; the state of the art, trends, and future directions in the markets, the technologies, and the regulatory environment in which the firm competes; the actions of competitors and the implications of these actions (Negash, 2004). Smart companies in the 21st century use business intelligence (BI) solutions to gain a clearer picture of their internal operations, customers, supply chain, and financial performance. BI solutions create learning organizations by enabling companies to follow a virtuous cycle of collecting and analyzing information, devising and acting on plans, and reviewing and refining the results. To support this cycle and gain the insights BI delivers, organizations need to implement a BI system comprised of data warehousing and analytical environments.