BI tells you what happened. You still need to decide what to do.

Business Intelligence (BI)

Business intelligence turns raw data into reports and dashboards. It tells you what happened — operating intel

Business Intelligence vs Operating Intelligence

BI tells you what happened — dashboards, queries, charts. OI tells you what to do next — risks, opportunities,

Operating Intelligence

A category of software that connects CRM, finance, and marketing data into a single operating view and surface

Data Warehouse

A centralized storage system that collects, structures, and stores data from multiple business systems (CRM, E

Data Lake

Data lake = centralised raw-data repository on cheap object storage (S3, GCS), schema-on-read. Dominant 2010–2

Data Lakehouse

Data lakehouse = lake-class storage (Parquet on object storage) + warehouse-class properties (ACID, schema, in

Data Mart

Data mart = subject-area subset of analytical data (sales/finance/marketing) modelled for one team's reporting

Semantic Layer

A translation layer that sits between a data warehouse and reporting tools, defining business metrics (revenue

Metric Store

Metric store = centralised metric definitions exposed via API to any consumer. Largely synonymous with headles

Metric Layer

Metric layer = architectural layer for centralised metric definitions. Synonymous with metric store, semantic

Headless BI

Headless BI = decoupled metric semantic layer that any consumer (dashboards, AI tools, reverse-ETL) can query

Embedded Analytics

Analytics capabilities built directly into a software product's interface, so users access dashboards, reports

KPI Dashboard

A visual display that shows an organization's key performance indicators in real time, combining metrics, tren

Operating Dashboard

A single-screen view that aggregates revenue, margin, pipeline, and forecast data from multiple business syste

Self-Serve Analytics

A data access model where non-technical users (operators, managers, executives) can explore, query, and visual

Data Product

Data product = dataset treated as a managed product (owner, consumers, SLAs, versioning, lifecycle). Discovera

Data Catalog

Data catalog = searchable inventory of data assets with metadata, ownership, documentation, classification, li

Data Lineage

Data lineage = documented dependency graph of analytical data. Levels: table-level (most common), column-level

Data Governance

Data governance = policies + tooling for responsible data management (quality, security, privacy, access, rete

Data Normalization

The process of cleaning and standardizing data from multiple sources so it can be compared and analyzed togeth

Single Source of Truth

SSoT = every critical metric defined and calculated in one canonical place all teams reference. When marketing

Metric Tree

Metric tree = hierarchical decomposition of a top-level metric (revenue, NRR, CM) into driving sub-metrics, do

Connected Data

Data from multiple business systems — CRM, finance, e-commerce, and marketing — unified into a single normaliz

ELT (Extract, Load, Transform)

ELT = Extract → Load → Transform (in warehouse). Modern default for cloud analytical workloads. Won because wa

ETL (Extract, Transform, Load)

ETL = Extract → Transform (in staging) → Load. Dominant 1990s–early 2010s when warehouse compute was expensive

Reverse ETL

Reverse ETL = warehouse → operational systems sync. Closes the loop after ELT pulls data inbound. Use cases: C

CDC (Change Data Capture)

CDC = read database transaction logs (Postgres WAL, MySQL binlog) to capture inserts/updates/deletes increment

Star Schema

Star schema = central fact table + denormalised dimensions in star layout. Dominant analytical pattern (Kimbal

Snowflake Schema

Snowflake schema = normalised dimensional model with dimension sub-tables. Storage savings vs query complexity

Dimensional Modeling

Dimensional modeling = analytical-database design around facts (events + measures) and dimensions (context). K

Topic hub

Operating Intelligence

Topic hub

Data Infrastructure

Topic hub

Profit Intelligence