Speak with any business leader and you’ll likely hear a lot about the rising need for business intelligence methodologies in today’s business climate. But what is it business intelligence?
Business intelligence (BI) is an assortment of processes, technologies and methodologies that gather and transform raw data into useful and actionable information for business purposes. Capable of managing large amounts of data, BI allows for the development of new and effective strategies that lead to growth opportunities and market advantages. By gaining clear perspectives on customer buying habits, risks, liabilities, competition and economic climate shifts through BI, leaders are better able to make informed decisions to improve business and reduce costs.
Major Components of BI
OLAP – Also known as online analytical processing, OLAP uses sophisticated tools to interpret data using navigational insights such as time and hierarchies. It also provides summarized views of business data and is used for planning, reporting, and analysis in order to optimize business processes and procedures. OLAP can be used with data warehouses or data marts designed for robust enterprise intelligence systems.
Advanced Analytics – Also known as data mining, predictive analysis or forecasting, advanced analytics uses statistical analysis techniques to predict certainty measures on facts.
Corporate Performance Management (CPM) – CPM usually offers a receptacle of some sort for several items to plug into so the aggregate can tell the whole story.
Real Time BI – Real time BI allows for real time distribution of metrics through various communication portals such as email, messaging systems and interactive displays.
Data Warehousing – A data warehouse supports the gathering of data by handling the many enterprise records for cleansing, aggregation, integration and query tasks. It can also house operational data used for enterprise-wide strategical decision making.
Data Sources – Data sources can be from historical data, operational databases, external data or from market research companies. They can be relational databases or any other data structure that supports the businesses’ particular applications. Data sources are generally flexible in nature and can reside on various platforms and contain structured information like spreadsheets and tables, or unstructured information such as pictures or plain text files.
Business Intelligence Tools
BI tools are software applications that have been developed to retrieve, analyze and report on complex data. These tools usually read data that has been stored previously in a data warehouse or data mart, and turn it into useful information for an organization’s benefit. Some of the most common business intelligence tools are business and data analytics, predictive analytics, cloud and mobile BI, big data, and visual analytics.
Why Business Intelligence Matters
BI offers numerous benefits to organizations, such as improving channels of communications internally, coordinating business activities, and perhaps most importantly, allowing companies to respond swiftly to changes in customer behavior, financial conditions and supply chain operations. When companies can make swift and accurate decisions based on solid data, growth is inevitable.
In today’s constantly changing global marketplace, organizations need every competitive advantage possible. BI can revolutionize a company’s ability to utilize information they already own and turn it into effective business strategies.
