Decision Support System Technologies - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages Internet is one of the major technological drivers to bring those changes. As a result, now businesses are going global, physical boundaries are getting meaningless. One of the major outcomes of this technological influence on the businesses was the development of the information systems.
Initially, in late 1950's and early 1960's, these information systems used to do batch processing, generating a limited number of reports. Later on, these systems keep on growing and ultimately emerged in to ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning). ERPs were highly integrated systems that helped to automate and integrate various business operations. However, what was really missing even then was the support to decision making capabilities. As these information systems were designed to automate the business operations, therefore the reports generated out of it were also operation centered and thus were not able to provide the enterprise-wide view and consequently, they were of little use to strategic decision makers. This problem gave birth to various decision support system technologies. Let us explore each of them separately.
Web analytics is the term used to describe the application of the concept of business analytics or business intelligence on the websites. It is also called web intelligence. We can also say that it is the study of the behavior or behavioral analysis of the website visitors. (Schlegel) Over the period of time, web analytics has been evolved as one of the major analysis tools to monitor the marketing done through web. One of the techniques of web analytics is click stream analysis. In the context of the businesses, web analysis is the use of the data collected from the website so as to ascertain, which part of the website works towards the business objectives. There are different types of information that can be gathered from the web analytics. The most important one is the web traffic report. Other worth collecting information heads are, email response rate, sales and direct mail campaign response rate, marketing and the lead generation information etc. The data thus collected is then measured against the set benchmarks. (Rober)
Informatica Corporation focus closely on using web to enable organizations to track business performance. Using the Informatica Business Intelligence platform, organizations gather business information metrics via voice systems, the web, and wireless transmission. Informatica Analytics Delivery Platform is an internet based system, that provides real time data about the business performance results.

Here is the list of the business intelligences tools that support web analysis, specially through XML tools:
Actuate 6 by Actuate Corp.
Business Objects Web Intelligence by Business Objects.
Clear Research, Clear Events by Clear Forest Corp.
Cognos Series 7, Cognos Web Services SDK
Crystal Enterprise, Crystal Reports, Crystal Analysis Professional by Crystal Decisions.
DATA WAREHOUSING:

The name data warehousing refers to the warehouse to store data. Just like the additional inventory that is at the moment not required for current business operations is kept in the warehouse and is called when needed. Likewise, in a data warehouse, the data not relate to current operation, such historical data is placed in the data warehouse.

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