Market Intelligence

Market intelligence' is the information relevant to a company’s markets, gathered and analyzed specifically for the purpose of accurate and confident decision-making in determining market opportunity, market penetration strategy, and market development metrics.

Business Intelligence refers to skills, processes, technologies, applications and practices used to support decision making. Business Intelligence often aims to support better business decision-making and as such can be defined as a decision support system.

Market intelligence includes gathering of data from the company’s external environment, whereas the Business Intelligence process primarily is based on internal recorded events – such as sales, shipments and purchases. The purpose of incorporating Market Information or intelligence into the Business Intelligence process is to provide decision makers with a more “complete picture” of ongoing corporate performance in a set of given market conditions.

To support corporate strategy and ongoing decision making, a Business Intelligence System comprise roughly of an Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) processor, a data warehouse and a range of reporting tools. Information from existing corporate data sources is extracted, transformed and then loaded into a data warehouse. From here data is being analyzed and pulled into various reporting systems. The market information feed from the external environment into an analytical processing unit, which could be either within or outside the Business Intelligence tool.

We have two different setups for pulling of external market intelligence into the Business Intelligence system. From outside the platform, the market information is a part of the source system environment, where it could already have been analyzed in a separate transactional database and then extracted, transformed and loaded into the data warehouse or into a separate data mart for feeding into the “front room”.

Alternatively, and perhaps in a more logical way, from within the Business Intelligence system, the market information could also be feed (ETL) non-analyzed and uniformly directly into the data warehouse, or a data mart, from where it is finally being analyzed and reported in “the front room”.

One challenge (open question) is to determine the extent of analyzing or precessing market data in a transactional database, before feeding into the data warehouse and finally again analyze in the front room.