Business Intelligence: A Guide on Everything You Need to know

Business Intelligence(BI) is a set of methods, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into important information that drives valuable business actions. It is a suite of software and services to convert data into actionable intelligence and knowledge.

In this tutorial, you will Learn-

1. What is Business Intelligence?
2. Why is Business Intelligence Important?
3. Process and Activity of Business Intelligence.
4. Four types of Business Intelligence Users.
5. Business Intelligence system Advantages
6. Business Intelligence system Disadvantages.
7. Trends in Business Intelligence.

What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence (BI) links business analytics, data mining, data visualization, data tools, and infrastructure. And best practices to help businesses to make more data-driven judgments. In practice, you know you’ve got modern business intelligence when you have a complete view of your business’s data and use that data to drive change, eliminate incompetence, and instantly adapt to market or supply changes.

Why is Business Intelligence important?

Business intelligence can help organizations make better judgments by showing present and historical data within their industry context. Analysts can leverage BI to provide performance and competitor benchmarks to make the company run smoother and more efficiently. Analysts can also more easily spot market trends to improve sales or revenue. Used efficiently, the right data can help with anything from compliance to hiring efforts

Some ways that business intelligence can help businesses make more intelligent, data-driven decisions:

• Recognize ways to improve profit

• Analyze customer behavior

• Compare data with competitors

• Track performance

• Optimize operations

• Predict success

• Spot market trends

• Identify issues or problems

Process and Activity of Business Intelligence.

Over the past few years, business intelligence has grown to include more processes and activities to help increase performance. These processes include:

Data Mining: Using databases, statistics, and machine learning to open trends in large datasets.

Reporting: Sharing data analysis to stakeholders so they can draw results and make judgments.

Performance metrics and benchmarking: Comparing current performance data to historical data to follow the performance on goals, typically using customized dashboards.

Detailed analytics: Using preliminary data analysis to find out what happened.

Querying: Asking the data specific issues, BI extracting the results from the datasets.

Mathematical analysis: Taking the results from detailed analytics and further examining the data using statistics such as how this trend happened and how?.

Data visualization: Turning data analysis into visual representations such as charts, graphs, and histograms to more efficiently use data.

Visual analysis: Examining data through visual storytelling to deliver insights on the fly and stay in the flow of analysis.

Data preparation: Selecting multiple data sources, recognizing the dimensions and measurements, preparing it for data analysis.

4 types of Business Intelligence Users

Understanding given are the four key players who are used Business Intelligence System:

1. The Professional Data Analyst:

The data analyst is a statistician who always wants to drill deep down into data. BI system helps them to get fresh insights to develop unique business plans.

2. IT users:

The IT user also plays a powerful role in maintaining the BI foundation.

3. The head of the organization:

CEO or CXO can improve the profitability of their business by increasing operational efficiency in their business.

4. The Business Users

Business intelligence users can be found across the company. There are mainly two types of enterprise users

• Casual business intelligence user
• The energy user.

The difference between both of them is that a power user has the ability to work with complex data sets, while the casual user need will make him use dashboards to assess predefined sets of data.

Advantages of Business Intelligence:

Here are some of the benefits of using a Business Intelligence System:

1. Increase productivity

With a BI program, It is possible for companies to create reports with a single click thus saves lots of time and support. It also allows employees to be more productive in their duties.

2. To increase visibility

BI also helps to increase the visibility of these methods and make it possible to recognize any areas which need attention.

3. Fix Responsibility

BI system assigns responsibility in the company as there must be someone who should own responsibility and ownership for the company’s performance against its set aims.

4. It provides a bird’s eye view

BI system also helps companies as decision-makers get an overall bird’s eye view through typical BI features like dashboards and scorecards.

5. It streamlines business rules:

BI takes out all complexity associated with business rules. It also automates analytics by offering predictive analysis, computer modeling, benchmarking, and other methodologies.

6. It allows for simple analytics.

BI software has democratized its usage, allowing even nontechnical or non-analysts users to receive and prepare data immediately. This also allows putting the energy of analytics from the hand’s many people.

Disadvantages of Business Intelligence1. Cost:

Business intelligence can prove expensive for small as well as for medium-sized companies. The use of such type of system may be valuable for routine business activities.

2. Complexity:

Another drawback of BI is its complexity in the implementation of the data warehouse. It can be so complex that it can make business systems hard to deal with.

3. Limited use

Like all improved technologies, BI was first established keeping in consideration the buying competence of rich firms. Therefore, the BI system is yet not affordable for many small and medium-sized businesses.

4. Time Consuming Implementation

It takes almost one and a half years for the data warehousing system to be completely implemented. Hence, it is a time-consuming process.

Trends in Business Intelligence

The following are some business intelligence and analytics trends that you should be aware of.

Artificial Intelligence: Gartner’s report indicates that AI and machine learning now take on complex tasks done by human intelligence. This ability is being leveraged to come up with real-time data analysis and dashboard reporting.

Collaborative BI: BI software combined with collaboration tools, including social media, and other latest technologies improve the working and sharing by teams for collaborative decision making.

Embedded BI: Embedded BI allows the integration of BI software or some of its features into another business application for improving and extending it’s reporting functionality.

Cloud Analytics: BI applications will be soon offered in the cloud, and more companies will be moving to this technology. As per their predictions within a couple of years, the spending on cloud-based analytics will grow 4.5 times faster.

Summary

BI is a set of processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into significant information that drives valuable business actions.

BI systems help businesses to identify market trends and spot business problems that need to be addressed.

BI technology can be used by Data analysts, IT people, business users, and the head of the organization.

BI system helps a company to improve visibility, productivity and fix responsibility

The draw-backs of BI is that it is a time-consuming costly and highly complex process.

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