What is Business Intelligence? The Complete Guide

BI software was developed in the early 1990s and started used in different businesses of all sizes. Now we can see how BI has changed over time. The development of self-service BI tools and augmented analytics technologies are based on artificial intelligence and Machine Learning. It helps businesses to analyse their data themselves instead of depending BI professionals to run it for them. The ultimate guide to business provides insight and advice on how to manage BI features successfully.

Business intelligence reveals meaningful data used by the senior executives, managers, and operational team in different situations.

For example, business intelligence provides actionable insights into business performance, processes, and trends to management teams to find problems, challenges and help to take actions.

BI platforms are housed in data warehouses to offer baseline information. The strength of a data warehouse is that it combines all the data from various sources into a single central system that allows for business data analytics and reporting. BI provides data to users in the form of reports, charts, graphics, and charts which shown in a dashboard.

Data warehouses can include an online analytical processing (OLAP) engine to manage multidimensional queries.

For example, what are the sales rates for our southern side versus northern side this year versus last year?

OLAP is a powerful technology for data discovery. It enables Business Intelligence’s analytic calculations and predictive analytics. One of the primary advantages of OLAP is the consistency of quality, customer interactions and corporate process.

Data lakehouses are often utilized for business intelligence.  A data lakehouse has the advantage of addressing the core difficulties common to both data warehouses and data lakes. As a result, more optimal data management solution for the enterprise. Lakehouse represents the next generation of data management systems.

These are the steps in the BI process:

Data sources: Determine what data will be evaluated and analyzed. Data from a data warehouse or data lake, the cloud, Hadoop, industry statistics, supply chain, pricing, sales and marketing, CRM, inventory, website, or social media.

Data collection: Collect and clean data from various sources. This data preparation could involve manually gathering data into a spreadsheet or using automated extract, transform, and Load software (ETL).

Data Analysis: Looks for patterns or unexpected results in the data. This could be included in data mining, search, or modelling techniques.

Data Visualization: Create data visualizations, graphs, and dashboards with business intelligence technologies like Tableau, LeapSurge BI, SAP or MS Excel. This visualization should contain drill-down, drill-through and drill-up tools that help the users to analyze data at multiple levels.

Action Plan: Create actionable insights based on a comparison of historical data to key performance indicators. Actions could include more efficient procedures, marketing customizations, supply chain risks, or responding to customer experience issues.

Some new BI solutions can extract and load raw data directly using technology like Hadoop. However, data warehouses are frequently the preferred data source.

An effective BI process can generate a wide range of business benefits. For example, Bi enables C-suite executives and department managers to continuously monitor and track the business performance. Analysing customer data improves marketing, distribution, sales, customer service and supply chain processes can be identified before they create economic loss. HR managers can track employee productivity, labor expenses and other workforce metrics.

Overall, the main advantages of BI solutions for businesses are the ability to do the following functions:

• Optimize internal business operations.
• Improve operational efficiency and productivity.
• Identify business issues that need to be addressed.
• Identify new business and market trends.
• Create new business strategies.
• Drive up sales and new revenue.
• Gain a competitive advantage over the enterprises.

Contradictory Conclusions

Self-service BI helps many teams to seek for the insights they need, but it can also lead to different conclusions, causing more friction rather than a united plan of action. This is especially true if human bias is included in the analysis.

Shortage of Skills

From a wide variety of sources, data integration might be difficult, and the integration might exceed current capabilities.

Expertise in data science, engineering, and architecture is needed to ensure that analysis offers real-world insights.

Up-front expenses

The initial costs to develop a powerful, modern BI system may appear to be costly. But the cost savings generated by analysis will more than pay for the initial investment.

BI real-world applications

Business intelligence offering valuable functions in multiple industries.

Customer Service: With both customer and product data available from a single data source. Customer care reps immediately answer customer questions or start to resolve their issues or complaints.

Finance and banking: By combining customer histories and market conditions, financial businesses can assess current business health and hazards, as well as predict future success. Data can be analysed branch by branch using a single interface to find areas for improvement or more investment.

Healthcare: Patients can easily get answers to considerable number of critical healthcare questions without having to ask lengthy questions of medical personnel. Internal processes including inventories are easier to monitor and track within minutes.

Retail:  Retailers may cut costs by comparing performance and benchmarks across stores, channels, and regions. With more visibility into the claims process, insurers can identify areas where they are falling short of service targets and use that data to improve results.

Sales and Marketing: By combining data on promotions, pricing, sales, consumer activities and market trends. Marketers can make better future market decisions and campaigns. Detailed targeting or segmentation can hike the sales.

Security and compliance: Centralized data and unified dashboards can help increase accuracy and identify the underlying causes of security issues. Compliance with rules can be assisted by using a single system to collect reporting data.

Recent innovations in business intelligence have focused on self-service BI tools, which allow non-technical users to perform automatic analysis and reporting. The IT team remains responsible for managing corporate data, including accuracy and security, but multiple teams can now have direct access to data and oversee their own analysis, rather than having the job wait in queue for IT to run.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are expected to be integrated into modern business intelligence and analytics systems as technology improves. With today’s focus on self-service, these capabilities can also help the company analyse data more quickly and generate deeper insights. Al-based systems may read from various sources automatically, capturing the most important data to lead decision-making.

Natural language queries, which are more user-friendly non- SQL specialists, are among the latest technologies in enterprise BI systems. Some BI systems include low-code or non-code development capabilities allowing users to design their own tools, apps, and reporting interfaces to speed up answers and time-to market.

Do you need to establish Business Intelligence for your business? Contact us today!