What is Business Intelligence? Why it is important? How it can help your business?

Business Intelligence is the application that transforms business data into a presentable view. It can be in the form of graphs, charts, reports, or dashboards. It helps your business to use your organizational data to make better decisions. BI tools use many types of data like historical, current, structured, unstructured, in-house, and third-party data. BI uses various techniques from big data mining to predictive analysis. Your business can use useful insights extracted from data analysis. This can help your business in improving business decisions, identifying issues, and solving the issues.

You can use BI software to track your KPI( Key Performance Indicator) and transform your historical data into predictive suggestions.

Some Business Intelligence Tools:

1. Microsoft Excel: MS Excel is not a dedicated BI application but has features like creating static and dynamic charts and tables. MS Excel can also create a dashboard. It is still used by many small businesses as a BI tool.

2. Microsoft PowerBI: PowerBI is a dedicated interactive BI application developed by Microsoft Corp. It is a cloud-based BI service and a part of Power Platform. It is a collection of applications and connectors that function together. Data can be provided as JSON, CSV, and XML. It can turn data into attractive visualizations and interactive insights.

3. Tableau: Tableau is an interactive data visualization application. It was developed by Christian Chabot, Pat Hanrahan, and Chris Stolte, who were researchers at Stanford University. It was acquired by SalerForce in 2019 for $15.7 billion. Tableau products include Tableau Server, Tableau Desktop, Tableau Online, Tableau Mobile, Tableau Cloud, Tableau CRM, Tableau Prep Builder, and many more.

4. SAP BusinessObjects: SAP BusinessObjects is a BI enterprise software. It was acquired by SAP AG in 2007 at $6.8 billion. Its flagship product is BusinessObjects XI, which provides performance management, query, analysis, planning, reporting, and enterprise information management. It also offers consulting & education services to help clients deploy business intelligence projects.

5. Zoho Analytics: Zoho Analytics is a BI tool that provides an interactive and intuitive dashboard with various visualization options. It can also integrate with Zoho’s other applications like CRM, Desk, and Creator and also can fetch data from other applications. Data visualization features, sharing options, and customizability.

6. Oracle BI: Oracle BI also known as Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus( OBI EE Plus) is a set of business intelligence tools of Oracle Corporation. It leverages a common BI Server providing integration among other tools. It includes extensions like OBIA (Oracle Business Intelligence Applications) and Oracle Scorecard: an implementation of balanced scorecard reporting.

7. IBM Cognos Analytics: IBM Cognos is a web-based integrated business intelligence suite by IBM. Cognos offers a set of tools for analytics, scorecarding, reporting, and monitoring of events & metrics. The software consists of several components designed to meet the different information requirements of a company. IBM Cognos has components such as IBM Cognos Cube Designer, IBM Cognos Framework Manager, IBM Cognos Transformer, Cognos Connection, Query Studio, Reporting Studio, and Workspace.

Why it is important?

Computer advancements have revolutionized our world and changed the way we used to live. Businesses and Governments are also affected by modern technologies. Businesses use data-driven tools, techniques, and strategies that allow them to learn more about their previous, present, and potential customers. BI tools use historical or third-party data for predictive and interactive analysis. Analytics make decisions making 5 times faster. 70% of businesses think data discovery is very important. In 2020, 54% of organizations agreed that cloud-based BI tools were important to their present and future initiatives. Both small and big firms use BI in their decision-making. You can have a competitive advantage in business when you use the BI application. BI applications are evolving continuously with Machine Learning and AI technology. Extracting data from customers and the market, making the beneficial allocation of resources, and improving the performance of your businesses.

Any organization with a BI-related strategy will have data that is accurate, complete, and organized.

Business intelligence can help in organizing teams, keeping them aware of key performance indicators (KPIs). BI Reports make teams aligned and make them focus on their objectives.

How Business Intelligence can help your business?

There are many ways BI tools can help your business. First, it can make the decision-making process better and faster. It will enhance your employee’s productivity. Data is the new oil, data-driven predictions and decision-making can boost the performance of the business.

You can get better ROI by understanding the domain of your business and allocating your resources to meet the objectives you want.

By monitoring your business operations and making improvements, fueled by data insights.

So how can BI application helps you in decision-making:

1. You can organize your data in BI tools to get better and more accurate insights

2. Finding patterns and relationships in the data of your organization and your targeted customer base.

3. Presenting the solutions in informative visualizations

You can analyze real-time data according to your need. You can extract data points from the data and transform them into graphs and charts. For example, you can blend your financial data with sales, marketing, and operations data. You can extract data points that can help you to understand what will impact your profits and losses.

You can save time and resources, you can access your historical and current data to analyze data like metrics of the supply chain to find solutions to organize your business structure and process.

What value Business Intelligence can provide you?

1. Descriptive analytics: Descriptive Analysis is the simplest form of data analysis. It is the analysis of historical and current data that is used to identify trends and relationships. In simple words, it answers the questions that what happened and what is happening.

2. Prescriptive analytics: Prescriptive analytics is the process of data-driven decision-making. It answers the question “What should we do next?”.

3. Predictive analytics: In predictive analytics, we use advanced analytics in data mining, machine learning, and other predictive modeling.

Your business can benefit from business intelligence in various ways including Visualization, connection, collaboration, analysis, insights, decision-making, productivity, scalability, multiplatform multiuser, speed, accuracy, trusted data, employee & customer satisfaction, resource management, KPI targets, and many more.