Business Intelligence (BI)
Delivering Powerful Business Insights to Make Better, Faster Decisions
BI covers an array of software and ideas, and understanding its scope involves becoming familiar with other data-related terms, such as data analytics, data warehousing, data lake, data modeling, ETL, and data integration.
Business Intelligence Systems
There are many reasons why organizations adopt business intelligence and analytics tools, and many ways these solutions are put to work to benefit the organization. All projects, however, have the common goal to use business intelligence software to turn data into insights and action.
Business intelligence has as positive a impact
on an organization's people as it does on performance, projects, and decisions. Business Intelligence is used to turn data into actionable information for leadership, management, organization and decision making.
- Faster reporting, analysis or planning
- More accurate reporting, analysis or planning
- Better business decisions
- Improved data quality
- Improved employee satisfaction
- Improved operational efficiency
- Improved customer satisfaction
- Increased competitive advantage
- Reduced costs
- Increased revenues
- Saved headcount
The ways organizations are learning to use business intelligence
The following are some of the ways organizations are learning to use business intelligence:
- Analysing customer behaviours, buying patterns and sales trends
- Measuring, tracking and predicting sales and financial performance
- Budgeting and financial planning and forecasting
- Tracking the performance of marketing campaigns
- Optimising processes and operational performance
- Improving delivery and supply chain effectiveness
- Web and e-commerce data analytics
- Customer relationship management
- Risk analysis
- Strategic value driver analysis
Features of Business Intelligence
- Reporting
With business intelligence reporting software that takes information from one or more data sources and presents it in an easy-to-read format, business users can stay informed and get answers to questions asked at regular intervals. They can design rich, interactive, pixel perfect dashboards and scale to thousands of users, as well as ad hoc reports for the web, print, or mobile device.
- Analysis
With data analysis software designed to model, visualize, and manipulate any type of data and support better decision-making, users can spot trends, identify issues, and generate insights. They can explore data with powerful relational OLAP or in-memory analysis against any data source.
- Dashboards
With dashboards that combine data and graphical indicators and deliver at-a-glance summaries, users can view the state of business, track key performance indicators (KPIs), generate insight into historical and real-time context, and act faster. When software developers embed these dashboards within applications where executives and knowledge workers are taking action, they make their products more valuable and competitive.
- Data Integration
A data mart or warehouse can be built with data integration software that extracts, transforms, and loads (ETL) data from different sources for reporting and analysis purposes. Several disparate relational or non-relational data sources can also be combined and made quickly accessible using data virtualization technology.