Drive decisions and outcomes with Big Data
Business Intelligence & Analytics
Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence & Analytics
What are Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics?
Business Intelligence and Analytics are data management systems that help organizations improve their decision-making process and business performance using real-time information. This software collects historical and current data, uses tools to analyze this raw data, and delivers insights for making better future decisions.
What is BI? BI is the modern-day technology that enables organizations to make data-driven business decisions to enhance their business operations and profits. Business Intelligence & Analytics benefits any organization by combining technologies like data mining, business analytics, and data visualization.
By analyzing massive volumes of Big Data, Business Intelligence & Analytics can provide deeper insights and reveal data patterns and trends.
How Business Intelligence Work
Here is how modern enterprises use business intelligence:
- Raw data is first collected, processed, and stored in data warehouses. BI tools rely on data warehouses to aggregate data from multiple sources and store them in a centralized system. BI tools generally use the Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) method to aggregate the data.
Typically, BI tools use a variety of data sources including CRM, supply chains, marketing analytics, and sales performance.
- Business analysts explore the stored data and initiate the data analysis process for solving business problems. This involves data mining that analyzes aggregated data to uncover patterns and outliers to provide visibility into business operations.
- Next, BI tools collate these collected data and display them in BI dashboards in the form of plotted charts and graphs. Easy to understand, data visualization provides real-time insights into the business data, thus enabling immediate decision-making.
Data visualization provides a format that is easy to understand. It uses visual elements like charts, tables, graphs, and much more to convey a data-driven story.
- The final step is to take appropriate action on the available business insights.
With real-time adjustments and strategic changes, business intelligence & analytics eliminate business inefficiencies and adapt the business to market shifts.
Business Intelligence provides both previous and current insights into the business. It uses the latest tools right from analytics in business to data mining and predictive analytics. An example of the use of business intelligence and analytics is that of the Amazon eCommerce store providing targeted product recommendations to an online shopper.
Know your customers better
Ramp up performance & revenue streams
Identify sales trends
Implement & improve personalization
Accelerate operational efficiency
Automate from end-to-end
Benefits of Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence & Analytics can benefit organizations in many ways including the following:
- Improved decision making
By providing relevant data insights at the right time, business intelligence enables organizations to take the right decisions that can translate into business success.
- Data visualization
With business intelligence and analytics software tools, companies can now visualize their organizational data on customized dashboards and reports. Visualized data is easier to interpret and is available at any time.
- Customer satisfaction
With tools, organizations can understand their customer’s needs and address their concerns. Companies can leverage their customer feedback and comments to improve their customer service or identify new business opportunities.
- Improved business productivity
Companies using business intelligence and analytics can implement agile business processes while reducing their costs. This helps them achieve higher business productivity. Using data-driven strategies, organizations can focus on achieving their business goals.
Future of Business Intelligence & Analytics
Along with effective analytics, business intelligence is seen as a necessity for most business enterprises. Going forward, BI and analytics will become collaborative to enable efficient teamwork. As more BI tools integrate with third-party systems like CRM, it will further simplify data processes and extract more relevant business insights from data.
On the infrastructure side, systems are currently available to store larger volumes of data, thus enabling connected BI systems. With a data-driven culture, organizations can provide more opportunities for employees to integrate BI and Analytics into their daily work and processes.
The Place of BI in Today’s Business Environment
Be it a small enterprise or large corporation, business enterprises struggle to make sense of the growing volume and complexity of their generated data. In a constantly evolving business environment, companies have lesser time to innovate and respond to changing customer needs.
Companies increasingly require high-quality Business Intelligence solutions to detect data trends and opportunities and resolve their business challenges. Using Business Intelligence and Analytics tools, companies can acquire and maintain a competitive edge in today’s business environment.
Frequently Asked Questions about Business Intelligence
1. Why is Business Intelligence important?
Business intelligence enables companies to make data-driven business decisions. It enables faster analysis and facilitates intuitive dashboards that improve organizational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and employee satisfaction.
2. How do enterprises use business intelligence?
Business intelligence has been used by several enterprises in different industries to gain access to a variety of data sources and reports. BI-enabled applications can also be used to secure data from cyberattacks and online threats.
3. Provide an example of Business Intelligence.
Manufacturing companies use BI to identify demand & supply-related problems or opportunities in their supply chain operations. They can determine the cause of supply delays or detect inconsistencies in their forecasts or supply chain processes to ensure supply optimization.
4. What are the 4 concepts of Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence is built on 4 main concepts, namely – Data, People, Processes, and Technology. Each of these 4 concepts is important to build an effective BI strategy in any organization.