Business intelligence is the art of deriving actionable insights from data. Under the hood is a stack of different technologies.
Trading systems like sales, marketing, HR, and purchasing generate and reflect real-world activity, but they don’t tell you how to improve your numbers. This is where Business Intelligence Function comes into play.
Understanding Business Intelligence
In other words, a set of technologies that transform data into actionable insights that can be used to make more informed strategic decisions. Business intelligence presents data as reports, visualizations, and dashboards. Dashboards can include charts, maps, and text summaries.
BI helps managers correlate and trend data from different sources. Managers can use BI to gain actionable insights and make better business decisions. Like raising a child, it takes an entire village or an entire software ecosystem to derive useful and actionable business intelligence and improve business decisions. The ecosystem includes data sources, data warehouses, ETL tools that carry data from source to destination, and analytics software.
Together, these software tools form a modern data stack. Let’s explore the process by which the modern data stack supports business intelligence.
The global BI market is predicted to expand from $23.1 billion by the end of 2020.
How Basically Business Intelligence Works
Companies and organizations have questions and goals. To answer these questions and track your performance against your goals, collect and analyze the necessary data to determine the actions you need to take to reach your goals.
On the other side, raw data is collected from business systems. Data is processed and stored in data warehouses, clouds, applications, and files. Once stored, users can access the data to initiate analytical processes and answer business questions. BI platforms also provide data visualization tools that transform data into charts and graphs and present them to key stakeholders and decision-makers. Globally, 26% of all businesses have chosen Business Intelligence.
Business Intelligence Method
Business intelligence encompasses the processes of collecting, storing, and analyzing data from business operations and activities to optimize performance rather than a specific “thing.” All of this together creates a holistic view of your business and helps people make better, actionable decisions. In recent years, business intelligence has evolved to include more processes and activities to improve performance.
Benefits of Business Intelligence
Now you know what Business Intelligence is and how it works. But how does Business Intelligence actually help companies?
Business Intelligence is more than just a software, in a way to holistic view of all relevant business data in real-time. Implementing Business Intelligence provides many benefits, from better analytics to increased competitive advantage. Key business intelligence benefits include:
- Increased data
- Clarity
- Efficiency
- Better customer experience
- Improve employee satisfaction
How to Develop a Business Intelligence Strategy
A BI strategy is a recipe for success. Decide how data will be used, collect key roles, and define responsibilities early on. At a high level, it may sound simple. The key to success, however, is to start with your business goals.
To create a BI strategy from scratch:
- Understand business strategy and goals.
- Identify your most important stakeholders. Select sponsors from among key stakeholders.
- Select your BI platform and tools.
- Create a BI team.
- Define a scope.
- Prepare your data infrastructure. Define your goals and roadmap.
Categories of BI Analysis
There are three main types of BI analytics, serving various needs and uses. These are predictive analytics, descriptive analytics, and prescriptive analytics.
Predictive analytics uses historical data to model future outcomes for planning purposes. Descriptive analysis is the process of using historical and current data to identify trends and relationships in data. Prescriptive analytics also requires all relevant data to answer the question, “What should my business do?”
Business Intelligence Strengths and Weaknesses
We have discussed many benefits of BI. However, like any major business decision, implementing BI comes with its own set of challenges and drawbacks, especially during the implementation phase.
Strengths of Business Intelligence are:
- Data visibility
- Accurate reporting
- Optimized process
Weaknesses of Business Intelligence are:
- Initial cost
- User resistance
- Data literacy gap
The Future Role of Business Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence products and services are constantly evolving to meet business needs and technology. That’s why we identify the latest trends each year to keep our users informed about innovations. Recognize that AI and machine learning will continue to increase, allowing organizations to integrate insights from AI into their broader BI strategy. Data sharing and collaboration efforts will increase as organizations try to become more data-driven. Data visualization becomes even more important when collaborating across teams and departments. BI provides near real-time sales tracking capabilities. This allows users to gain insight into customer behavior and predict profits. Various industries such as retail, insurance, and oil have adopted the BI, with more being added each year. The BI platform adapts to new technologies and user innovations.
BI And Big Data
As the data landscape grows and the collection, storage, and analysis of data become more complex, it becomes important to consider the relationship between BI and big data. Big data is an industry buzzword these days, but what exactly is it? Data experts define data in terms of the “four Vs.”: volume, velocity, value, and diversity. These define big data and set it apart from the rest. Volume, in particular, is what people usually cite as the main deciding factor, as the amount of data continues to grow and can be stored relatively easily for long periods. As you can imagine, this is important for BI. Businesses create more and more data each year, and BI platforms must keep up with the growing demands. A good platform grows with your requirements. But without maintenance, dashboards and data sources can fall behind as big data evolves.
Use Self-Service Business Intelligence (SSBI) In Your Company
Today, many of the organizations are moving to a modern business intelligence model characterized by a self-service approach to data. Self-service business intelligence (SSBI) is characterized by IT managing data (security, accuracy, and access) so that users can directly manipulate the data. This means IT can control data access while allowing more people to explore data and share insights visually.
Conclusion
Business intelligence combines business analysis, data mining, data visualization, data tools and infrastructure, and best practices to enable organizations to create more data-driven decisions. In fact, if you have a comprehensive view of your organization’s data, use that data to drive change, eliminate inefficiencies, and adapt quickly to market and product changes, then you have modern business intelligence. You can see that you have the modern Business Intelligence solution that prioritizes flexible self-service analytics, governed data on a trusted platform, empowered business users, and rapid insight. For more info contact Sky Potentials.
