What is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence refers to the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for data analysis of business information. BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies include reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics. BI tools perform data analysis and create reports, summaries, dashboards, maps, graphs, and charts to provide users with detailed intelligence about the nature of the business.
Key Components of BI
- Data Mining: Sifting through large amounts of data to identify patterns and establish relationships.
- Reporting: Sharing data analysis to stakeholders so they can draw conclusions and make decisions.
- Performance Metrics and Benchmarking: Comparing current performance data to historical data to track performance against goals, using customized dashboards.
- Descriptive Analytics: Using preliminary data analysis to find out what happened.
- Querying: Asking the data specific questions, and having BI pull the answers from the datasets.
- Statistical Analysis: Taking the results from descriptive analytics and further exploring the data using statistics to understand how trends occurred and why.
- Data Visualization: Turning data analysis into visual representations such as charts, graphs, and histograms to more easily consume data.
- Visual Analysis: Exploring data through visual storytelling to communicate insights on the fly and stay in the flow of analysis.
- Data Preparation: Compiling multiple data sources, identifying the dimensions and measurements, and preparing it for data analysis.
Benefits of Business Intelligence
- Informed Decision-Making: Central benefit of BI, driving business decisions with data.
- Efficient Reporting: Condensing reports into dashboards that are easy for non-technical users to understand and analyze, saving time and resources.
- Operational Efficiency: Providing holistic views of business operations for more informed decision-making.
- Customer Satisfaction: Improved service delivery based on better understanding of customer behavior and preferences.
- Revenue Increase: Identifying and maximizing sales opportunities through better insights into data.
- Competitive Advantage: Gaining an edge over competitors through unique insights into the market and consumer behaviors.
Modern Business Intelligence
Today’s BI tools integrate databases, visualization, and analytics to improve the strategic planning process. They enable a broad range of users to build reports from scratch or edit existing ones in real-time with little to no input from IT staff. Users can tap into powerful database systems to pull and examine data in ways that were once limited to experts in data science. Modern BI software also offers more in-context analytics, meaning that BI tools are directly integrated into business applications where data is being used.
Business Intelligence transforms raw data into meaningful and useful information for business purposes. It can help organizations transform their operational and strategic activities through a more systematic and organized understanding of the underlying trends and patterns in their data. With the advent of advanced BI technologies, the scope of business intelligence has expanded considerably, allowing organizations to make smarter, data-driven decisions with unprecedented precision.
Sources:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/business-intelligence-bi.asp | https://www.tableau.com/learn/articles/business-intelligence | https://www.cio.com/article/272364/business-intelligence-definition-and-solutions.html
