Let’s begin the article with the basic definition of the term “Business Intelligence” (BI). In its simplest sense, business intelligence (BI) describes the leveraging of technologies and business processes and methodologies to manipulate and transform data into actionable insights, helping business organizations make informed data-driven decisions. In other words, it supports your business' data & analytics efforts.
Specifically, through various stages of data collection, data formatting, and careful analysis, and so on, along with the use of data infrastructure, tools, and visualizations, companies can get a comprehensive view of their current business state, delivered directly from executive to management of operational teams.
One of the main objectives of Business Intelligence is to collect and process data for better insight readability for faster decision making. Many times, a spreadsheet with tables and thousands of rows of records might prove difficult to derive actionable insights. This is where BI comes for the rescue. Through data visualization, BI can transform the analysis of various metrics and numbers into visual dashboards and reports where the business insight will be faster to understand and easier to analyze.
It’s worth mentioning that Business Intelligence is descriptive, BI informs business about what’s happening in the present and the past based on historical data, and see if business is on track against your business plan. In comparison to manually analyzing the raw set of data, BI, through visual interactive dashboards and reports, can provide a full business picture with clear patterns or describe trends that may not be easily detected when analyzing data manually.
Below is a number of ways that BI can help companies with operations and data-driven decisions making:
Companies that embrace a strong BI strategy are indeed already ahead of the curve. But long gone are the days that only multinational corporations can use BI. Nowadays, smaller enterprises can take advantage of data to make informed and profitable business decisions. Next, let’s take a look at the new trends of Business Intelligence in the upcoming period:
Along with the advancement of technology, BI is also evolving and changing, enabling companies to analyze their huge volumes of data more efficiently and effectively.
It’s worth noting that many companies nowadays look to cloud-based or software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions instead of on-premise ones to keep up with the complex scalability requirements and faster implementations.
D-a-a-S refers to a number of cloud-based, on-demand, data products - offering the advantages where the vendors manage data storage and preparation, delivered ready to use. D-a-a-S also provides several key benefits like quick set-up time, enhanced flexibility, automated maintenance, etc. among many others.
Business organizations across industries, including BFSI, healthcare, and travel, have been adopting BI to transform their business operations.
For example, American Express Global Business Travel (GBT) uses BI tools to identify travel patterns and cost-savings opportunities, boost compliance, renegotiate rates with preferred suppliers, and enhance duty of care obligations.
Many start-ups and business organizations also use BI to help them understand their customers better, specifically learning how customers use their products and how they can retain customers more efficiently.
Having all large volumes of their customers' interaction data in one place, BI makes it much easier to identify trends and insights. With BI, organizations can see all their data in aggregate or dive into individual customer data for in-depth examinations. For many product start-ups, this can help both the customer services team to identify patterns and solve problems as well as the engineering team for their subsequent release(s).
Business intelligence encompasses a range of processes and methods which involves data collecting, storing, and analyzing data sourcing from various business activities and systems such as:
Data is cleaned and aggregated to produce accessible dashboards, showing decision-makers the current status of their organization's business. Below are some of the most common processes and techniques in BI and how they’re used.
For example, through data mining, a digital retail business can discover which products are more popular on mobile channels and decide to further emphasize its presence there. If a manager or analyst is looking for a particular insight related to certain product categories, there can be a good chance that data supporting such insight already exists, they only need to leverage BI, specifically data mining, to find it.
Here, for ETL, data can be retrieved from single or multi-sources (e.g. CRM, Website, etc.) and come in different formats such as documents, spreadsheets, CSV files, relational databases, and so on. Some common types of transformation include deleting duplicate data, calculation, splitting and merging, etc.
Again, data retrieved from multiple sources may result in an increasing number of data problems that require cleanings, such as Missing value (e.g. Customer records without email address), Uniqueness (e.g. Two customers with the same ID number), Misspellings, And others.
There are a number of BI solutions available to allow users from any business line to take advantage of them, aiding users in analyzing business metrics and deriving insights in real-time. The primary features of any Business intelligence (BI) solutions include integration of data from various sources, data preparation and analysis, scheduled and/or ad-hoc reports, and pre-built or custom dashboards.
Some of the most popular BI platforms and tools are as follow:
Many companies adopt self-service BI solutions to make it easier for their business users from different business lines such as sales executives, marketers, HR to get useful insights from BI systems, driving more efficient and data-driven decision makings, resulting in better business outcomes.
Investing in a BI solution is a no-brainer if your business is looking to find insights in the huge volumes of data to make better decisions. Many modern BI tools can offer self-service BI capabilities helping companies to decrease the dependency on IT teams, at the same time allow decision-makers to quickly recognize new market trends opportunities, spotting performance gaps, etc. thus advancing their places in the competitive landscape.
With years of experience in Business Intelligence consulting and implementation, KMS Solutions can help you implement a BI solution that aligns with your business goals, meeting budget and ensuring maximum ROI.