What Is Business Intelligence?
Modern technologies have taken over every aspect of our lives, and business is no exception. Today, businesses utilize all forms of technologies to their advantage, and one crucial aspect of using these technologies is information or data.
Business Intelligence offers businesses the power to harness data accurately and use it for multiple technologies like data analytics, machine learning, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), which results in incredible benefits for companies.
Let’s discuss Business Intelligence (BI), its importance for businesses, its benefits, and some common solutions. It will help you understand why your business needs to start taking advantage of this modern technical infrastructure.
What Is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence (BI) comprises the procedures, strategies, technologies, and technical infrastructure that analyze the data a business entity produces and collects. It is a broad term that includes many data mining and data analytics techniques.
BI helps process and understand all the complex data sets that a company obtains about itself, its employees, and its customers. The result of BI is the generation of easy-to-understand charts, reports, trends, and measures, that make it easier for the people in charge to make informed and calculated management and business decisions.
It helps reduce guesswork and increases the precision and accuracy of the business and its efforts. Several software companies make Business Intelligence programs, tools, software, and solutions to better utilize their business data.
With a wide variety of BI solutions like data visualization programs, reporting software, spreadsheets, data mining tools, and other analytical tools, businesses get immense benefits from BI.
Why Business Intelligence (BI)?
There is a popular concept in the finance and computer worlds known as GI-GO, which stands for garbage in, garbage out. The idea is that if you input poor information (garbage in) into a system or program, you will only get poor results (garbage out).
If business managers and decision-makers are provided incorrect or incomplete data, they will generally produce inaccurate decisions, further compromising the business. With Business Intelligence, they can get accurate and refined data to produce better results through correct decisions.
BI solutions perform data analytics and typically present them on a dashboard with metrics and measurements designed to allow better user decision-making.
There are many reasons why businesses, large and small, turn to BI. It can help businesses in many aspects, including marketing, production, sales, compliance, and even hiring. Since companies have a lot to gain from improved data analytics, BI has quickly become a core business value.
Businesses that incorporate BI may gain precise, accurate, and faster data analytics, enhanced decision making, increased revenue, and even improved employee satisfaction. They also enhance the quality of their business data and reduce their costs significantly, often as much as 20-30 percent.
For example, BI can help warn an ice cream company to rest and limit their production efforts if winter comes early or if summer is cooler than usual. Similarly, if sales show strong growth in a specific region, production can be upped, and extra shifts can be added to meet market demands.
Such production management is a single example of how BI solutions help anticipate things that may impact sales, helping businesses make better, real-time decisions. These decisions subsequently help reduce waste, costs and increase overall revenue.
Diving Deeper
For accurate and precise analysis, BI cannot rely solely on the current data sets of your business, which is why it seeks to increase the amount, accuracy, and relevance of your business data.
Hence, more volumes of accurate data are gathered from new, untapped sources. BI also checks the collected data for errors and structures it properly so that data analysis becomes possible and more streamlined.
This step is essential because most raw data from business is unstructured and typically has many different formats. Unstructured data makes it challenging to gather and analyze the underlying information and patterns. Most Business Intelligence software, tools, and solutions optimize the raw data for accurate analysis by unifying it and making it more feasible for general analytic purposes.
The technologies and tools of BI are constantly evolving and improving upon previous iterations. This rapid development in this field makes these technologies more complex and sophisticated. Hence, they may require more time to process the data for in-depth and detailed reporting.
There is a trade-off between speed and the depth of analysis for greater insights. However, with the help of data scientists and data analysts, your business can filter out any unnecessary data and reduce any excess processing time.
Data filtering improves BI since it limits the need to gather and format all the information, including unnecessary data, which helps increase reporting speeds.
Common Types of Business Intelligence Solutions
Here are some common types of BI solutions
- Data Mining
Large volumes of data can be mined through data mining tools to make sense of large data sets. BI solutions can utilize technologies like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to look for underlying patterns and structures within large data sets.
- Reporting
BI uses reporting tools and software to display, organize, and filter data in many different ways to understand the information better.
- Data Visualization
This key BI solution transforms datasets into graphical representations that are visually pleasant and easy to read, providing meaningful insights that help decision-makers make important decisions quickly.
Conclusion
Business Intelligence is highly beneficial for all businesses, no matter their size, sector, or market. Companies big and small take advantage of BI solutions and use BI tools and technologies to gain an edge over their competitors.
Of course, since more companies use BI than ever before, your competitors might already be using BI to their advantage. No need to worry, as you can still have the competitive edge if you utilize Business Intelligence properly and improve your business’s data collection, quality, analytics, and subsequent decision-making.
With the support of modern data analytics, machine learning, and AI, Business Intelligence is a powerful piece of technical infrastructure that can quickly propel your business to new heights. Therefore, we highly recommend you start using it immediately.
If you want to learn more about Business Intelligence or assistance from professional experts in acquiring the best BI solutions for your business, please visit our website today.
