Business intelligence comes in as a very powerful asset to an enterprise if greatly harnessed on as it comprises of data, technology and decision making.
Business intelligence simply comprises of strategies, data and technologies used by enterprises to make operational and strategical decisions.
Some of its common functions are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, event processing, bench-marking and prescriptive analysis.
Why is business intelligence important
Examples of BI
Example 1:
Example 2:
A hotel owner uses BI analytical applications to gather statistical information regarding average occupancy and room rate. It helps to find aggregate revenue generated per room.
It also collects statistics on market share and data from customer surveys from each hotel to decides its competitive position in various markets.
By analyzing these trends year by year, month by month and day by day helps management to offer discounts on room rentals.
Example 3:
A bank gives branch managers access to BI applications. It helps branch manager to determine who are the most profitable customers and which customers they should work on.
The use of BI tools frees information technology staff from the task of generating analytical reports for the departments. It also gives department personnel access to a richer data source.
Users of BI
- The IT users: The IT user also plays a dominant role in maintaining the BI infrastructure.
- The Data Analyst: The data analyst is the statistician who always needs to drill deep down into data. BI systems helps them to get fresh insights to develop unique business strategies thereby resulting to data driven and well informed decision making.
- The head of the company: CEO or CXO can increase the profit of their business by improving operational efficiency in their business.
- The business users: Business intelligence users can be found from across the organization. There are mainly two types of business users
- Casual business intelligence user
- The power user.
Importance of Business intelligence
- Improved Visibility.
- Accountability
- It increases productivity
- Provides competitive advantage.
- Facilitates better understanding of available primary and secondary data, which again affect operational efficiency of several departments.
Business Intelligence trends
Artificial Intelligence: Gartner’ report indicates that AI and machine learning now take on complex tasks done by human intelligence. This capability is being leveraged to come up with real-time data analysis and dashboard reporting.
Collaborative BI: BI software combined with collaboration tools, including social media, and other latest technologies enhance the working and sharing by teams for collaborative decision making.
Embedded BI: Embedded BI allows the integration of BI software or some of its features into another business application for enhancing and extending it’s reporting functionality.
Cloud Analytics: BI applications will be soon offered in the cloud, and more businesses will be shifting to this technology. As per their predictions within a couple of years, the spending on cloud-based analytics will grow 4.5 times faster.