BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Ever wonder how these corporate societies manage to function so normally? How do they manage their data? Well… Answer to all their problems is ‘Business Intelligence’.
Business Intelligence has become an important part of today’s society. Every other field requires it to be beneficent.
What comes to your mind when you think of Business Intelligence?
Something related to Technology? Data Management? Fruitful business models? Well… yes, it is all of that.
Business Intelligence refers to technologies, applications and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of business information.
Business Intelligence plays an important role in identifying potential customers and has an impact on a company’s strategic and tactical business decisions.
Its sole purpose is to support better decision-making for fruitful outcomes.
HOW DOES A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM WORK?
ETL, i.e, extract, transform and load lies at the core of Business Intelligence systems.
The data is extracted from the corporate sources in huge amounts and that extracted data is scanned to find the potential customers. This extracted data is then replicated to a destination, i.e., A Data Warehouse, which supports online analytical processing.
In this process the tables are linked and the data is separated and a well-organized web is created.
As a result, this system will allow users to ask their queries, conduct surveys, and any other analysis.
BASIC TASKS OF A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM -
In science everything follows certain laws and principles, similarly, BI has its own task which helps to keep the industries functioning properly.
It all starts with Data Sourcing — It is the extraction of data from various sources like scanners, digital cameras, database queries, web searches, etc.
This is followed by the analysis of the data collected. Also known as data mining which is nothing but studying the data and synthesizing useful information from it.
It is also important to check the legitimacy of the sources. This not only includes receiving the data but also the extraction of the data from various sources, hard or soft.
The third fact that comes in is Situation Awareness. The data collected requires filtering and deletion, i.e., refining in order to get the useful part. BI system sets all the information in context of a business and its environment in order to fasten the next process, i.e., Risk Assessment. It makes this task easy by weighing in the current condition and predicting the future conditions, analyzing the problems that may arise. It helps in selecting the actions in such a way that would make no or least harm to the company instead would profit it in the near future.
The last task is Decision Support. BI helps predict the wrong decisions being made and warns about takeovers, market changes and poor staff performance beforehand so that preventive measures can be taken.
Overall, these tasks make BI more efficient and helpful for us.
Is BI a Boon or a Bane ?
BI makes it very easy to keep an eye on all the data, its processes and the areas which need to be modified, in an organization. It also enables the organizations to get an overall view of the activities by creating dashboards, scoreboards and similar data divisions.
These divisions help to keep track of the activities, set goals and analyze different programs at once. It also allows the organizations to fix their errors (if any) and provides the industries with analyzed data. Hence, providing a clear result for them to decide their future policies which would be beneficial. That being said, think if something goes wrong then who would be responsible to correct it? Yes.. a Business Intelligence system.
BI system gives accountability to organizations and sets goals that can be accomplished. BI helps in saving a lot of time as it produces results with just one click, as a result, increasing productivity.
For all of its advantages, BI system is something of a double-edged sword. BI system requires a lot of time and a huge amount of money for its setup. This is the reason why most small enterprises do not go with this option. The main cost is spent in setting up the routine transactions.
Also, BI can get complex at times. Hence risking the security of the user. At times the complications increase to such an extent that it binds the user to their limits with some fixed business techniques. To make BI fully integrated, one might need to invest in an entire umbrella of services including several data warehouses for protection of the user data.
Taking time into consideration, installing a data warehouse takes almost a year and a half, and investing is nearly impossible for the new entrepreneurs.
ROLE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES IN BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE-
The ability to share photos, opinions, and events in real-time through Social Media, has transformed the way we live and the way we do business. Today, information from one part of the world reaches the other within seconds. Therefore, companies should consider such social networking sites as a source for the collection of their data. Social sites have high data accuracy and give real-time feedback.
By observing properly, BI systems can decide what a customer really wants, what all problems are being faced by the customers. This will help the companies to make the necessary decisions.
Social sites also help to keep a track of the rival companies and briefs about the customer reviews. While there is an option to try and measure everything, there is no need to obsess over every metric available. BI also refines the data it gets from social networking sites which permits easy functionality.
ROLE OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE IN VARIOUS FIELDS -
- INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
With the increasing industrial growth, the demand in the IT sector is increasing. As a result the IT departments are being overloaded with reporting requests, training and user support, etc. Searching data using traditional methods is a time-consuming and tedious task. In order to reduce the workload of analysts, we require business intelligence. BI platforms are designed to support IT infrastructure and data storage helping integrate the system without middle-tier platforms. It allows access to multiple datasets at a time using several databases from various levels and different Operating Systems. With integrated data, the IT department is able to set up data platforms easily enabling them to pull requests and report functions that the user has permission to see.
- HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY
Business Intelligence helps manage the complete medical history of the patient on the system. BI is paving the way for remote healthcare opportunities for everyone. It offers benefits of improved patient safety and management at reduced costs and increased revenue to provide visibility into financial operations.
With the complete patient history on the system, healthcare institutions can pre-empt medical issues a patient is facing.
In the case of a critical condition of a patient, doctors from different departments can easily analyze the problem and make faster and better decisions.
- FINANCE AND MARKETING
The Financial sector has huge amounts of data to deal with. Business Intelligence provides operational efficiency by devising new investment techniques in order to boost profit. By analyzing the market, the most profitable customers are found. Now, this data is used to develop new cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
With the financial market constantly changing the risks can increase. Therefore, BI helps reduce these risk factors by efficiently analyzing the mistakes.
- TELECOMMUNICATION INDUSTRY
Telecom operators serve millions of customers therefore gaining individual customer-level insights and providing them with personalized services is a tedious task. Business Intelligence provides better visibility to network issues and their location. It also provides the operators ‘information obtained from raw data to do targeted marketing campaigns and come up with the best pricing strategy and products based on consumer understanding. It helps telecom operators with data monetization, routing their money into better data management units.
WHAT DOES A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE ENGINEER DO?
A Business Intelligence Engineer develops, deploys and maintains BI interfaces. They format business requirements for BI tools translating them into technical ones. They select, organize and put the information in a proper way creating a data model for the data to be stored in the database. They also keep a track of contents in a data warehouse and meta-data storage.
All this said, the quintessence is “BI is important for the better management of data” which will help maintain a healthy balance between data transparency and consistency.
BI is important to break dependency on traditional sources in order to get the right data. It will provide industries a full-fledged solution with easy cloud to cloud computing and enable the organizations to readjust their decisions before they are made and implemented.
