What is Business Intelligence (BI)? Its Needs and Impacts?

Meaning of Business Intelligence (BI)

A business intelligence solution's purpose is to enable businesses to make strategic decisions by analyzing and using their data. The term Business Intelligence (BI) applies to all the tools, systems, platforms, and processes that support it. In other words, BI is not simply a reporting tool or platform, but rather a business strategy that enables an organization to make more effective, proactive decisions.

The goal of business intelligence is to enable business users to access, trust, and clean their data through IT, tools, systems, processes, and infrastructure. This includes data warehousing, extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes, data cleaning, data mining, data analytics, querying and reporting, data visualizations, and dashboards. Depending on how you handle the data, you may need multiple pieces of software to cover all stages of the data process.

What is the need for BI?

Your business performance can be determined by data. Business intelligence is all about gaining insights faster so you can make more accurate business decisions.

How does this impact my organization?

A Business Intelligence solution isn't just about tools and dashboards that hope to provide some value to someone. In reality, it's more of a strategy than a platform. This enables an organization to shift from making reactive decisions based on descriptions they are told to making proactive decisions based on data-driven analytics. Those decisions give decision-makers confidence about the results they are seeing. Every organization has a unique data strategy; this decision must not be made by coming up with requirements and comparing them to what tools can do, but rather by committing to making a (potentially significant) change in how business users interact with data. Because Business Intelligence isn't limited to the IT organization or even the analysts who provide the information. End-users and their interactions with data every day dictate a large part of the strategy. An effective Business Intelligence strategy cannot exist without its adoption and ultimately, approval. Information can only be disseminated to the last adopter.

What are some best practices in Business intelligence?

It is beneficial for organizations when they can fully evaluate operations and processes, understand their customers, gauge the market, and drive improvements. For this to happen, they require the right tools to gather business data from anywhere, analyze it, discover patterns, and find solutions.

An effective BI system helps them do this by:

Interfacing with a wide range of different data systems and data sets, including databases and spreadsheets.

Analyzing data deeply and uncovering hidden relationships and patterns in it.

Data visualizations such as reports, maps, charts, and graphs present answers in an informative and compelling manner.

Including side-by-side comparisons of data across different scenarios.

Offering drill-down, drill-up, and drill-through functionality that allows users to explore data at different levels.

READ MORE: Why Enterprises Fail With Their Business Intelligence Initiatives