Big data plays an enormous role in business success. The downpour of information available to a given company is tremendous and how it’s acquired depends on the tool used. Services that encompass business intelligence analyze, extract, and transform this flood of info into meaningful reports. Anything from financial costs to click-through rates on an article at a certain time of day fall under the umbrella of modern business intelligence.
Business intelligence is to improve an organization’s business operations through the use of relevant data. Companies that effectively employ BI tools and techniques can translate their collected data into valuable insights about their business processes and strategies. Such insights can then be used to make better business decisions that increase productivity and revenue, leading to accelerated business growth and higher profits.
Without BI, organizations can’t readily take advantage of data-driven decision-making. Instead, executives and workers are primarily left to base important business decisions on other factors, such as accumulated knowledge, previous experiences, intuition and gut feelings. While those methods can result in good decisions, they’re also fraught with the potential for errors and missteps because of the lack of data underpinning them.
Benifits
A successful BI program produces a variety of business benefits in an organization. For example, BI enables C-suite executives and department managers to monitor business performance on an ongoing basis so they can act quickly when issues or opportunities arise. Analyzing customer data helps make marketing, sales and customer service efforts more effective. Supply chain, manufacturing and distribution bottlenecks can be detected before they cause financial harm. HR managers are better able to monitor employee productivity, labor costs and other workforce data.
Overall, the key benefits that businesses can get from BI applications include the ability to:
- speed up and improve decision-making.
- optimize internal business processes.
- increase operational efficiency and productivity.
- spot business problems that need to be addressed.
- identify emerging business and market trends.
- develop stronger business strategies.
- drive higher sales and new revenues; and
- gain a competitive edge over rival companies.
BI initiatives also provide narrower business benefits — among them, making it easier for project managers to track the status of business projects and for organizations to gather competitive intelligence on their rivals. In addition, BI, data management and IT teams themselves benefit from business intelligence, using it to analyze various aspects of technology and analytics operations.
BI Technologies
- Ad hoc analysis.
- Online analytical processing (OLAP).
- Mobile BI.
- Real-time BI.
- Operational intelligence (OI).
- Software-as-a-service BI.
- Open source BI (OSBI).
- Embedded BI.
- Collaborative BI.
- Location intelligence (LI).
