What is Business Intelligence and why does it matter?
Improved customer relations, increased employee productivity, new revenue streams — big benefits await those who breathe new life into their business intelligence strategies.
First of all, let’s clarify what does it mean Business Intelligence that all businesses never stop talk about.
Business Intelligence is the process of analyzing and reporting historical business data to explore, analyze and model large amount of complex data towards one major goal: improve business performance.
· The first step to any form of Business Intelligence consists in gathering raw data. Once the data is collected, data engineers use what is called an ETL (Extract Transform Load) tool to manipulate, transform, and classify the data in a structured database called data warehouses or data marts.
· The second step is that BI specialist comes to translate his collected data into insights along the way of business processes, in terms of reports and dashboards that can be used to get access to the firm’s data.
There are many terms you could know as you’ve just started in this field; first let’s discover differences between analysis and analytics, they don’t have the same meaning.
So, let’s start with analysis; imagine you have a huge data set containing various types, instead of tackling the entire dataset and running the risk of becoming overwhelmed, you then can separate it into samples that easier to study them individually and examine how they relate to each other and that’s analysis _you perform analysis on things that have already happened in the past such as explain how there was a decrease in the salles last summer.
Now this leads you nicely onto definition of analytics as you can probably guess.
Analytics generally refers to the future instead of explaining past events, analytics is essentially the process of going in logical insights obtained in an analysis part to exploring what you can do with them in the future.
Let’s say you are an owner of an online clothing store, you are ahead of the competition and have a great understanding of what your customers’ needs and wants are, you’ve performed a very detailed analysis from women ‘s clothing and feel sure about which fashion trends to follow, you may use this to decide on which styles to start selling, so relying on that you can predict which month it would be the best to do that. This is an example of using analytics through analyze past data to extract and predict future_you can call that “intuition”.
So now let’s zoom into Business Intelligence to make sure you understand the concept, Business Intelligence is not just about creating dashboards and reporting with visuals, it ‘s about having new culture and modern approach in decision-making, what’s the role of visualizing data without make decision through what you’ve just seen!
The power of smart decision making:
I would tell you that smart decision making it’s like adding magic spice to your business performance!
The way these decisions work wisely and effectively is:
· When you measure and identify customer behavior to act more strategically and exploit all up-selling or cross-selling opportunities, that means know how to deal with your prospect because people love to buy but hate to be sold!
· Make sure gather all data and information from your customer and why not calling him to ask powerful questions which getting you the results that you want.
· Through this process you can know such a degree how customer satisfy with your products or services including previous purchases and where they are in the sales cycle so that make customer service response mush better to spot when a prospect is in the buying mode.
The bottom line here is if you know your customers and serve them well, they are always willing to pay more.
As you may see today almost everyone asks how can I achieve more in less time? How can I pick the high level of productivity? The key word here is productivity it’s powerful as you think, because smart and fast decisions comes with optimal productivity, but how?
It’s all about two things:
1. Automation, you can automate report, dashboards, routine tasks…
2. Data centralization which is making data accessible on any device through cloud so that it can be easy to know where to look for answers.
Due to BI technologies you will be more productive in terms of inform, guide, manage and measure customer experience in less time and money.
Some of these technologies are data warehouses, dashboards, ad hoc reporting, data discovery tools and cloud data service.
The power of BI provides your team more opportunities in the way of business can benefit more internally and externally. For example, sentiment analysis is a kind of predictive analytics that analyzes text data, such as social media conversations, and infers how the consumers feel about a product or a brand.
Business Intelligence, it’s like an umbrella that covers collecting, storing and analyzing business operations, this umbrella basically placed in the primary step of every predictive analytics process.
One question a lot of people ask is “how do I reach my sales goals and how do I grow the business with minimum investment? Mathematically answered, business intelligence tools done right equals more efficient revenue.
I’d like to summarize with this quote:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…”
Through this you can see that life has good and bad times, it’s all about controversy and competition if you move your team to the light of Business Intelligence, you will win the battle and embrace the great improvement in your business.
