The Summit Program

University of Massachusetts > Business-Intelligence > Summit Program FAQ

What is the Summit Program
The UMass Summit Program is a partnership across the business communities and UITS to coordinate, manage, and deliver Enterprise Reporting efforts at the University. These efforts support the development of products, systems, and applications for Enterprise Reporting solutions.


What is Enterprise Reporting?
Enterprise Reporting is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data which joins a unified set of views of the Enterprise. These solutions help users make more informed and efficient business decisions based on analytical data and strategic views presented in an easily readable format.

The University's focus on Enterprise Reporting is essential because solutions can be:

• Mission-critical to an enterprise's operations, providing analytics to support strategic decision making
• Enterprise-wide or more focused on one division, department, or project
• Centrally initiated or driven by user demand
• Fundamental part of the larger movement towards improved Business Intelligence
  

Enterprise Reporting solutions include data warehouses and end-user tools that retrieve and report information from different, disparate data sources.

What is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence (BI) refers to the knowledge and practices used to help decision makers more easily aware of business-wide information that may be needed to improve operations or strategic direction. For this purpose BI collects, integrates, analyzes, interprets based on business rules, and presents the information. By extension, "business intelligence" may refer to the information itself or the knowledge developed from the information.
BI applications provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations, using data already gathered into a datamart.