What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence (BI) refers to the use of technology, tools, and processes to collect, analyze, and present business data for informed decision-making. It transforms raw data into meaningful insights, helping you to quickly identify trends, resolve problems, and grow revenue. Modern BI tools leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to automate analysis, unearth hidden patterns, and predict future trends, empowering you to make informed decisions faster.
How business intelligence works?
The traditional BI process required a lot of heavy lifting in terms of coding and manual analysis. Today’s top tools incorporate AI to enhance each aspect of business intelligence by automating processes, improving accuracy and efficiency, enabling advanced techniques, and generating insights and recommended actions.
Benefits of business intelligence
According to BARC’s BI Survey, the top benefits of business intelligence
software are improved data quality and faster, more accurate planning,
data analysis and reporting. But how do these translate to real business
value?
Here are the five key ways BI can deliver value within your organization:
- Informed Decision-Making: BI provides timely and accurate insights, enabling you to make informed business decisions based on a thorough understanding of your data.
- Improved Operational Efficiency: BI tools help streamline business processes by identifying inefficiencies, optimizing workflows, and facilitating data-driven improvements in operational efficiency.
- Enhanced Data Visualization: BI platforms offer advanced data visualization capabilities, helping you to comprehend complex information through interactive dashboards, charts, and graphs.
- Strategic Planning: BI supports strategic planning by providing a comprehensive view of key performance indicators (KPIs), market trends, and competitive intelligence, enabling you to align your strategies with business goals.
- Competitive Advantage: By leveraging BI, organizations gain a competitive edge through quicker access to relevant information, proactive decision-making, and a better understanding of market dynamics, customer behavior, and industry trends.
Benefits of business intelligence
According to BARC’s BI Survey, the top benefits of business intelligence software are improved data quality and faster, more accurate planning, data analysis and reporting. But how do these translate to real business value? Here are the five key ways BI can deliver value within your organization:
- Informed Decision-Making: BI provides timely and accurate insights, enabling you to make informed business decisions based on a thorough understanding of your data.
- Improved Operational Efficiency: BI tools help streamline business processes by identifying inefficiencies, optimizing workflows, and facilitating data-driven improvements in operational efficiency.
- Enhanced Data Visualization: BI platforms offer advanced data visualization capabilities, helping you to comprehend complex information through interactive dashboards, charts, and graphs.
- Strategic Planning: BI supports strategic planning by providing a comprehensive view of key performance indicators (KPIs), market trends, and competitive intelligence, enabling you to align your strategies with business goals.
- Competitive Advantage: By leveraging BI, organizations gain a competitive edge through quicker access to relevant information, proactive decision-making, and a better understanding of market dynamics, customer behavior, and industry trends.
What are Business Intelligence Tools (BI Tools)?
Modern business intelligence systems prioritize self-service analysis,
empowering businesses to gain insight into their market and improve
performance with comprehensive data discovery tools, methods, processes,
and platforms. Such business intelligence solutions include:
- Ad hoc analytics: an analysis process designed to answer specific questions on the spot
- Online analytical processing (OLAP): a computing method that enables multi-dimensional analytical queries
- Mobile BI: software that optimizes desktop business intelligence for mobile devices
- Real-time BI: an enterprise analytics approach that delivers real-time information to users by feeding business transactions into a real-time data warehouse
- Operational BI: a data analysis approach that utilizes real-time business analytics to automatically integrate real-time data into operational system for immediate use
- Software-as-a-service BI (SaaS BI): a cloud-hosted, subscription-based delivery model for business intelligence software solutions
- Open source BI (OSBI): business intelligence software solutions that do not require purchasing a software license
- Collaborative BI: the merging of business intelligence software with collaboration tools in order to streamline the sharing process
- Location intelligence (LI): software that is designed to relate geographic contexts to business data
- Data visualization software: facilitates the detection of patterns and correlations by providing visual context