What Is Business Intelligence?
What is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence or BI is a technology that transforms software and service data into insights.
These insights help businesses in making decisions. The data set is first analyzed through BI. The results are published as reports, summaries, dashboards, graphs, charts and maps.
These publications give officers an idea of the overall status of the organization.
‘Business Intelligence’ refers to multiple tools. Business Intelligence report highlights. And the dashboard is an integral part of it. Dashboards present the collected data in various forms to give an idea about the current state of the organization.
Business Intelligence does not inform users of a specific action to take. And generating reports is not the only function of BI. Rather, BI analyzes data to help understand the current business environment. It helps in generating clear insights by searching and consolidating the data required for making sound business decisions.
For example, if an organization wants to better manage its supply chain, it needs to use BI. Through this they will be able to find out where the delay in the transportation of goods is happening. At the same time, they can also find out where there are inconsistencies in the transportation process.
Business intelligence technology can also help an organization find out which products are most delayed or which transportation methods cause these delays.
Business Intelligence Vs Business Analytics
Business Intelligence describes in detail what is happening now and what happened in the past to understand our current state. On the other hand, Business Analytics is a general term used for data analysis methods. It can be ‘predictive’ or predictive. As such, it can inform us about what may happen in the future. Again, it can be ‘prescriptive’ or suggestive. That is, it can give us an idea of what to do to get better results. Business analytics is generally considered as a part of the larger field of business data analytics.
In the time frame we are discussing, the difference between the power of business intelligence and the predictive power of business analytics is not limited to reporting. The issue is also related to the question of who will use the business intelligence.
Business Intelligence Methodology
In the past, IT professionals were the primary users of BI applications. However, conventional BI tools have now become simpler and more user friendly. A large number of employees of various business organizations are using this technology.
Business Intelligence Software And Systems
Business Intelligence covers different types of tools. Some of the important categories and features of Business Intelligence are:
Dashboard
Visualization
Reporting
Data mining
ETL (tool for data transfer from one data store to another data store)
OLAP (Online Analytical Processing)
According to software selection brand SelectHub, among these tools, ‘Dashboard’ and ‘Visualization’ are by far the most popular. These two tools provide quick and easy-to-understand data summaries, which are central to BI’s value proposition.
There are numerous organizations providing BI services. Choosing any of these can be difficult. However, notable services include:
