Business Intelligence and the importance of good decision making
Today data is everywhere. According to recent studies, approximately 328.77 million terabytes of data are created each day. So, for this reason it’s more important than ever to ensure that we can make the right decisions. How we ensure our data enables better decision-making? Basically by adopting Business Intelligence!
But what is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven process for analyzing data and delivering actionable information that helps executives, managers and workers make informed business decisions. As part of the BI process, organizations collect data from internal IT systems and external sources, prepare it for analysis, run queries against the data and create data visualizations, BI dashboards and reports to make the analytics results available to business users for operational decision-making and strategic planning. In a very simple definition, Business Intelligence is the process of transforming data into relevant information.
The ultimate goal of BI initiatives is to drive better business decisions that enable organizations to increase revenue, improve operational efficiency and gain competitive advantages over business rivals. To achieve that goal, BI incorporates a combination of analytics, data management and reporting tools, plus various methodologies for managing and analyzing data.
By adopting Business Intelligence, its benefits and best practices, that I will explain later, organizations minimize the risk of wrong decisions. Like in the Boscombe Valley Mistery, when Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson arrived to a crime scene, that seemed obvious, Sherlock Holmes pointed out that obvious facts” can be deceptive, and sometimes to see this, you need to “shift your own point of view a little, [and] you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.”
Business Intelligence is what enables organizations to shift they point of view a little and finding something entirely different.
