Business Intelligence (BI) helps senior decision makers convert data into information and knowledge to allow them to make fact and knowledge-based plans and decisions, thus increasing their competitiveness.

BI consists of a set of tools and technologies for gathering, transforming, integrating, cleansing, storing and analyzing diverse data to derive actionable information, business knowledge and insight.

At 2i, we have practical experience in knowledge synthesis from complex and non-uniform data sources from a variety of providers and formats. We use data extraction, transformation and integration tools to build data warehouses with hundreds of millions of rows. Data is profiled and cleansed based on sound business rules, even if we have no editing control over the actual data source. Trends and business entities are identified using advanced algorithms including fuzzy lookup and data mining structures and techniques.

Analysts and decision makers are provided with reporting cubes (multi-dimensional databases) that enable them to look at the business picture, dynamically, from various angles and views. In addition to standard dashboards that summarize the whole picture using simple charts and gauges to track operations in the form of key performance indicators (KPI), they are able to drill up and down in operational data, slice and dice data, predict and forecast scenarios and derive knowledge.

2i uses Microsoft SQL Server BI technologies and tools for the heavy lifting while analysts can use the application of their choice including common office products like MS Excel 2007 or later. We extract data from any data storage with uniform data structure.