BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE (BI), TECHNOLOGY AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

Business Intelligence (BI) can be conceptualized as a set of information systems that support decision making, based on other data storage, analysis and data mining technologies (^{Thomsen, 2002}). However, there are theoretical gaps in some aspects of the concept that best defines Business Intelligence as a technological tool. Suppliers of IT solutions hold a variety of views in relation to the operational scope of these systems and their emergence. BI is geared towards obtaining information using data stored in transactional databases (^{Degent, 1986}; ^{Barbieri, 2001}; ^{Quandt; Fernandes, 2003}). In this respect, the aim of a BI system as a technology is to create a structure that transforms data registered within the organization into information useful in decisionmaking, thereby creating value for the company (^{Thomsen, 2002}).

Information is structured via fact and dimension tables into a data storage component. Dimension tables hold descriptive data reflecting an aspect of the business, that is, they help to define a component via information. Examples of dimension tables are: products, time and brand. These tables are described by attributes, that is, characteristics that define them. For example, the dimensionproduct can be identified by the attributes color, weight, size and unit price (^{Kimball, 1998}), while the concept of fact is related to the storage of numerical measurements for the business, that is, a factual measurement associated with a dimension. For example, the dimension product may be associated to a fact,sales, which is also related to the dimensiontime. In this hypothetical relationship, an analysis could be conducted to obtain the monthly sales for a product.