Business Intelligence (BI) is a combination of data gathering, data storage, and knowledge management which helps enterprises to analyze their business data and derive intelligent insights.
Tools such as dashboards, visualizations, reporting, data mining, ETL (extract-transfer-load), OLAP (online analytical processing) can also be categorized under Business Intelligence Tools.
Business Intelligence involves a sequence of processes to derive insights which include data mining, data preparation, querying, statistical analysis, performance metrics, descriptive analytics, data visualization, visual analysis, and reporting.
Traditionally, Business Intelligence was driven by the IT professional in the organization. They will analyze the data and provide reports to the respective department. The queries and follow up reports needed by various departments will yet again go to the IT and this becomes a time-consuming process providing delayed results. With these tools becoming more user friendly and features like drag and drop allowing business users to analyze their data and create the report, self-service BI is shortening the gap between individuals and data-driven insights.
In today’s world, business intelligence drives strategy enables operational reporting, provides insights for enterprises, and plays a key role in their operations and growth. Strategic use of business intelligence can benefit enterprises in many ways. It plays an essential role in day-to-day decision-making and forecasting for an enterprise.
Enterprises use strategies and technologies to analyze the data, which in turn helps in decision making, forecasting, and doing business with a competitive market advantage and long-term stability.
Business Intelligence provides historical, current, and predictive views of business operations to enterprises through reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, business performance management, predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics, etc.
Business intelligence can easily handle large volumes of data created by processes, sales, etc. in enterprises. This data is used to create a holistic view of business that can increase efficiency.
A wide range of operational to strategic business decisions in an enterprise such as product positioning, pricing, priorities, goals, and directions are made by using a robust enterprise BI tool. Enterprises can improve performance with an approach to business intelligence which involves aligning business, data, and analytics strategies and leveraging resources and expertise.
Business intelligence combines the data fetched from the market, where the company operates with the internal company data to get a complete picture. Using this combination of data, enterprises get empowered to gain insights into the new market, to assess demand and suitability of products and services for different markets, and to gauge the impact of marketing efforts.
Enterprise Analytics tools provide great dashboards and ad hoc queries that make the decision-making processes easier. Productivity and efficiency are increased in the complex environment of an enterprise. Enterprise BI tools can be installed on-premises or on cloud-based on the operations of an enterprise.
Enterprise BI tools can be deployed and scaled seamlessly as the business of the enterprise grows. The data can be easily curated and gives robust stability and reliability. With the help of these enterprise BI tools, enterprises can centrally manage data sources and maximize reusability, reliability, and consistency. These tools help in securing the data and can be easily integrated and automated as per the requirement of the enterprises to run the platform efficiently. The content can be easily tracked and managed. User licenses and server performance can also be monitored seamlessly.
To conclude, business intelligence helps in the overall performance and growth of an enterprise. As more organizations around the globe keep joining the Business Intelligence route, the data-driven insights will reach to the bottom level and influence revenue generation and decision making like never before. Business Intelligence is not just limited to the bigger organizations but is also finding new markets in smaller businesses as well as startups. This leads to an extensive penetration level across industries and verticals. Now, the users are not just the top tier of the company but also the mid-level and ground-level executives who are getting hold of data-driven insights and implementing change at the most basic level as well.
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