Importance of Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) comprises strategies and technology used by enterprises for the data analysis of business information. BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. We also tell that Business Intelligence allows businesses to learn about any process or trend affecting performance, why things are happening, and what is likely to occur in the future. Business Intelligence is a technology-driven process that involves various steps: data mining, analytical processing, querying, and reporting. Business Intelligence works by acquiring information from any system and then recording it in a database and then presenting It for your business.

According to Soloman Negash and Paul Grey, Business Intelligence (BI) can be defined as a system that combines 1) Data gathering 2) Data Storage 3) Knowledge management with analysis to evaluate complex corporate and competitive information for presentation to planners and decision-maker, with the objective of improving the timeliness and the quality of the input to the decision process.

Some elements of Business Intelligence are:

• Multidimensional aggregation and allocation

• Denormalization, tagging and standardization

• Realtime reporting with analytical alert

• A method of interfacing with unstructured data sources

• Group consolidation, budgeting and rolling forecasts

• Statistical interface and probabilistic simulation

• Key performance indicators optimization

• Version control and process management

• Open item management

Business intelligence can help companies make better decisions by showing present and historical data within their business context. Analysts can leverage BI to provide performance and competitor benchmarks to make the organization run smoother and more efficiently. Analysts can also more easily spot market trends to increase sales or revenue. Used effectively right data can help anything from compliance to hiring efforts.

A few ways that business intelligence can help companies make smarter, data-driven decisions.

• Identify ways to increase profit

• Analyze customer behavior

• Compare data with competitors

• Track performance and Optimize operations

• Predict success and spot market trends

• Discover issues or problems.

Business intelligence includes data analytics and business analytics but uses them only as parts of the whole process. BI helps users to draw conclusions from data analysis. Data scientists dig into specific data, using advanced statistics and predictive analytics to discover patterns and forecast future patterns. Business analytics includes data mining, predictive analytics, applied analytics, and statistics. Organizations conduct business analytics as a part of Business intelligence strategy. BI is designed to answer specific queries and provide at a glance analysis for decision planning however companies can use the process of analytics.

Business intelligence improves consumer behavior. BI analysis allows you to track global regional, and local consumption patterns to better understand current trends. This in turn allows you to develop and deliver products and services that can anticipate market needs.

BI improves productivity. BI makes the process of analyzing and interpreting data faster more efficient, giving you the power two understand business data as quickly as comes in, and it allows you to generate reports with the simple click of a mouse. This gives you and your employee more time to devote to running your business rather than analyzing it.

BI has been the province of a large organization, the type of company that can afford elaborate data collection centers and the computing power to analyze the data. But with the affordable data analysis tools, small and medium-sized businesses now have the ability to participate in the BI revolution as well. Finally, Business Intelligence of key data removes the guesswork from the business by quantifying solutions to complex problems rather than relying on vague impressions or gut instincts.