According to Wikipedia, BI: "Refers to technologies, applications, and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of business information and also sometimes to the information itself"

"BI systems provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations, most often using data that has been gathered into a data warehous or a data mart and occasionally working from operational data. Software elements support reporting, interactive 'slice-and-dice' pivot-table analysis, visualisation, and statistical data mining. Applications tackle sales, production, financial, and many other sources of business data for purposes that include, notably, business performance management."

By utilizing the best in open source BI solutions, the solutions provided by i-Kno includes some of the following BI functionalities:

Standard Reports

Still at the heart of BI lies standard reporting. With prebuilt and adhoc reporting solutions, i-Kno uses the collective knowledge of its employees to deliver the right report to the right business person for the right business decision at the right time. From custom adhoc reporting to repetitive reporting solutions using only the latest open source reporting tools, i-Kno makes sure that the right business decision can be made.

Analysis Cubes

While standard reports offer limited interactivity through the use of prompts, analysis cubes offer far greater dynamic slice and dice (drill down and drill through) ability. A few well-designed cubes can allow business users to dynamically explore data without the time and energy wasted in the process of requesting and waiting for IT to build large numbers of standard reports.

Dashboards

Dashboards are an excellent way to convey critical information to employees at all levels in an organisation. They can act as the "gateway" to standard reports, analysis cubes, and data mining results; or serve as a standalone component with interactive, interdependent objects.  In either case, they serve as the entry point for a well-designed business intelligence system.

ETL (Extract, Transform & Load)

ETL is the process of extracting data from external sources, transforming it to meet a business need and ultimately loading it into an end target ie. a data warehouse.

ETL at i-Kno not only refers to the concept of loading a data warehouse but in fact refers to the transformation of any data form to any other data form, purely for the purpose of reaching a designated business purpose. This can be for loading a data cube or for transforming simple hierarchical lists into complex file plans used for loading into our flagship ECM product.

i-Kno has been involved in various data transformation projects where our ETL skills has been tested to the full.