Every company is set up differently. Some companies build products (like Apple builds Iphones and Ipads). Other companies only offer services (doctors and nurses serve patients, but they don’t build a physical product). Because companies are set up so differently, each company is going to have a unique business intelligence architecture.
Standard BI Architecture
Your standard company is going to have a business intelligence program and an operational system. The operational system is just the system that your company is using to gather and store important information. You can think of it as a database of some sort. The business intelligence program is simply the program that your company uses to get information out of the database. Here’s a picture of your standard BI architecture.
Complex BI Architecture
Some larger companies might have more than one operational system. For example, a company might have a database or operational system for all the sales orders, a database for all the invoices, a database for all shipping transactions, and another database for manufacturing information. When this happens, a company might choose to store all of the information from the separate databases into a Data warehouse. Then the company uses a business intelligence program to get the information out of the data warehouse. Here’s a picture of a complex business intelligence architecture.
Remember this is all about how information flows throughout the company. The main difference between a complex architecture and a standard one is the number of operational systems being used. If there are a lot of operational systems, then a company will often create a data warehouse.
If you have a relatively small company and you can keep track of all your data in one system, then chances are your architecture will look like the standard architecture above. However, if you are part of a large organization and your company has to use multiple databases to keep track of all of the data that you have, then your business intelligence architecture will likely be very complex.