Business Intelligence or BI is the data infrastructure and technology of a company. BI is an umbrella term used for many related processes and technologies such as:

  • Process analysis
  • Descriptive analytics
  • Performance benchmarking
  • Data mining

BI analyzes the data generated by a company. It presents the analyzed data in an easy-to-understand form. It can be in the form of reports, trends, and performance measures that influence management decisions.

Business Intelligence

Companies use Business Intelligence to analyze data and provide actionable information. It helps business workers, managers, and executives to make calculated organizational decisions. As a part of the Business Intelligence process, organizations;

  • Gather data from external sources and internal IT systems.
  • Make it ready for analysis.
  • Run inquiry against data
  • Generate BI dashboards, data visualizations, and reports to make data understandable to others.

It assists the business users in strategic planning and operational decision-making. The goal of BI is to make better organizational decisions. Better decisions help the organizations to:

  • Improve operational efficiency.
  • Gain competitive advantage against business competitors.
  • Increase revenue.

BI uses a combination of analytics, reporting, and data management tools to achieve its goal. It also incorporates many methodologies to manage and analyze data.

Business intelligence systems maintain, optimize and streamline current operations. The purpose of BI is to support data-driven business decision-making. BI is used with report and query tools, organizational information systems, and briefing books.

It improves and maintains operational efficiency. BI software helps companies increase organizational productivity. It also offers many benefits. These benefits may include powerful reporting and data analytics capabilities. 

Using BI’s rich data visualization mechanisms, managers can generate intuitive, readable reports. These reports contain relevant, actionable data.

Importance Of Business Intelligence

BI helps organizations in better decision-making by showing historical and present data in a business context. Analysts use BI to provide competitor and performance benchmarks. It makes the organizations operate better and smoother. BI also helps analysts to identify market trends to increase revenue and sales. 

Following are ways how BI can help companies to make data-driven decisions:

  • Analyze consumer behavior
  • Predict success
  • Spot market trends
  • Spot ways to increase profit
  • Unveil issues or problems
  • Compare data with competitors
  • Optimize operations
  • Track performance

Technology Used In Business Intelligence

BI combines a set of data analysis applications used to meet information needs. Most of them are supported by traditional BI platforms and self-service BI software. Following are some types of technology used in Business Intelligence:

  • Ad Hoc Analysis
  • Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
  • Open Source BI (OSBI)
  • Embedded BI
  • Collaborative BI
  • Location Intelligence (LI)

Business Intelligence

1. Ad Hoc Analysis

Ad hoc analysis is also called ad hoc querying. It is one of the essential components of the modern application of BI. It is the key attribute of the self-service tools of BI. BI is the process of running and writing queries to examine specific organizational issues. While analysts create ad hoc queries randomly, they often end up running them regularly. Also, with the analytics results integrated into reports and dashboards.

2. Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)

OLAP is one of the oldest BI technologies. OLAP tools help users to examine data along many dimensions. Users choose dimensions suited to complex calculations and queries. Earlier, analysts used to extract data from the data warehouses. It was then stored in multidimensional cubes in OLAP. But now, it is possible to execute OLAP analysis directly as opposed to columnar databases.

3. Open Source BI (OSBI)

Open Source Business Intelligence software includes two versions:

  • Community Edition – It can be used free of charge.
  • Subscription-Based Commercial Release – It is used with technical support by the vendor.

For development uses, BI teams can access the source code. Also, some vendors of BI tools may offer free editions. They offer it to the individual users in the first place.

4. Embedded BI

Embedded BI tools implement data visualizations and BI functionality straight into business applications. They help business users to examine data within the applications that they use. Application software vendors often incorporate embedded analytics features. Also, business software developers can include them in internal applications.

5. Collaborative BI

Rather than a specific technology, collaborative BI is more of a process. It includes a combination of BI collaboration tools and applications. It helps users to work together on data analysis and share information with each other. For instance, users can interpret BI data and analytics outcomes. They can use comments, queries, and highlighting from online discussion tools and chats.

6. Location Intelligence (LI)

Location Intelligence helps users to examine the geospatial and location data. It incorporates map-based data visualization functionality to help users. LI offers insights on geographic components in business operations and data. Potential uses of location intelligence are:

  • Site selection for corporate facilities and retail stores.
  • Geotargeting or location-based marketing.
  • Logistics management.

7 Advantages Of Business Intelligence Applications In Decision Making

Business Intelligence draws analytical facts from a large amount of unstructured data. BI converts this data into usable information. This allows businesses to make informed strategic decisions. It helps businesses to increase organizational efficiency and productivity. 

This usable data provides meaningful insights into the patterns of the clients’ behavior. It may include clients’ likes and dislikes, their interests, online experience, etc. 

Contact centers handle many client contacts every day. From these contacts, we can extract untapped essential insights. These insights can help deliver great value to businesses.

Besides the above-mentioned benefits, other advantages of BI application in decision making include:

1. Increased Business Productivity 

Businesses can use their staff and resources to increase their business productivity. As the BI teams handle all the BI tasks, companies can save time and money. It results in effective reporting that supports better productivity of the organization.

2. Easy Access To Critical Information

Businesses benefit from BI as it improves their capabilities to make rapid choices and generate competitive advantage.

3. Improved ROI (Return On Investment)

Business Intelligence allows businesses to:

  • Decrease cost
  • Increase revenue
  • Boost margins
  • Promote cost avoidance
  • And much more.

Business intelligence also provides qualitative ROI in the form of:

  • Increased business and process efficiency
  • Staff productivity
  • Better decision making
  • Customer happiness
  • And more.

Thus, businesses using business intelligence can minimize operating expenses. It is possible through optimizing business processes and improving operational efficiency.

4. Integrating Existing Data Architecture

Companies may already have information and resources stored in databases before they start using BI. But, this will not cause any issue for the organizations. We can use BI solutions for many technological infrastructures. Companies can still integrate BI into the databases with which they are working at the time.

5. Informed Decision Making

Businesses can trace the effectiveness of their processes by reporting on accurate information. Business intelligence helps businesses in informed strategic decision-making. It is possible through providing critical information about:

  • Company’s current and past performance
  • Future trends
  • Predicted demands
  • Customer behavior
  • And so on.

Business intelligence ensures that organizations receive real-time enhanced reports. Thus, they can use the available information to run the business effectively.

6. Better Decision Of Sales

Using Industry-specific business intelligence, companies can find precise sales trends based on:

  • Consumer preferences
  • Reaction to offers
  • Internet shopping experiences
  • Purchasing behaviors
  • Patterns and trends that affect sales

By making the most of consumer purchasing habits, companies can identify the best course of action. Hence, they can retain valuable customers and cash in on lost sales chances.

7. Data accessibility

BI solutions allow accurate and fast access to many data sources and reporting. In this way, BI helps IT companies to work with all the information contained in databases.

8. Scalability

The scalability of a system means increasing its workability without weakening its performance. The system will work effectively regardless of the number of users using it at the same time. BI solutions help IT companies to ensure better mobile competencies, local and remote access.

How You Can Learn BI Technologies

As a beginner in this field, you must be curious to know and learn more about Business Intelligence. Wolf Careers Inc. offers a wide variety of top-rated IT certification training to its candidates. Business Intelligence Training helps you to gain BI-related knowledge and expertise. It will polish your skillset for this ever-changing field. You will learn about the modern technology and tools used in Business Intelligence.

The range of modules at Wolf Careers Inc. will help you understand the impact of the digital sphere on our personal and work life. Upon completion of certification, you will be able to apply for BI-related jobs. 

Wolf Careers Inc. offers the following courses related to Business Intelligence. You will get an in-depth insight into the tools and techniques used by BI professionals.

1. Business Intelligence Training

Business Intelligence is a broad term. It includes the infrastructure and tools along with the best practices and applications. This enables you to access and analyze information. It helps to optimize and improve the decision-making process and performance. The term BI represents the systems and tools. They play a vital role in the strategic planning process within an organization. It also allows you to collect, store, access, and analyze organizational data to help in decision-making.

2. Power BI Training

Power BI is rapidly gaining a lot of recognition worldwide. It has become the most significant self-service BI platform. Power BI is an essential tool for beginners and professionals. Power BI enables you to connect with hundreds of sources of data. It helps you design complex rational models with intuitive and simple tools. Power BI also assists you in building interactive and stunning dashboards from the strat.

3. Tableau Training

Tableau is a broadly used analytics and BI software trusted by companies like Unilever and Amazon. We use Tableau to explore, visualize, and share data in the form of Workbooks and Dashboards. Everyone can use Tableau to clean, analyze, and visualize the team’s data. It offers a drag-and-drop function which makes it easy to use. Through this training, you will learn to use Tableau’s interface. Also, how you can connect and present data through simple visualizations. 

To take advantage of this opportunity, enroll today and start learning right away!