Business intelligence (BI) encompasses all the processes and tools through which a company can collect various types of data, analyze it, and make strategic decisions. Every day, companies and organizations generate an incredible amount of data, which is often useless to the company except for the original purpose for which it was created. However, with the advancement of BI tools like Business Analytics, companies can use the collected data to make strategic decisions more quickly and effectively.
Business Intelligence: Definition
In practice, business intelligence combines business analytics, data mining, data visualization, tools and data infrastructure, as well as best practices to enable organizations to make more data-driven decisions. The concept of traditional business intelligence first emerged in the 1960s to describe an information-sharing system within organizations. It further developed in the 1980s alongside computer models for decision-making and data transformation into information. Modern BI solutions prioritize flexible self-service analysis, governed data on trusted platforms, more efficient business users, and information speed.
Business Intelligence: What is it?
“Business intelligence” is an all-encompassing term that refers to the processes and methods for collecting, storing, and analyzing data from business operations or activities to improve performance. All these elements create a comprehensive view of the company, helping people make better, actionable decisions.
In recent years, business intelligence has evolved to include more processes and activities to improve performance. These processes include:
- Data mining: Using databases, statistics, and machine learning to uncover trends in large datasets.
- Reporting: Sharing data analysis with stakeholders to draw conclusions and make decisions.
- Performance metrics and benchmarking: Comparing current performance data with historical data to monitor performance against goals, usually done using customized dashboards.
- Descriptive analysis: Using preliminary data analysis to understand what has happened.
- Querying: Asking specific questions of the data, where BI retrieves the answers from datasets.
- Statistical analysis: Further exploring data using statistics, such as determining how and why a particular trend occurred.
- Data visualization: Transforming data analysis into visual representations, like charts, graphs, and histograms, for easier data consumption.
- Visual analysis: Exploring data through visual representations to communicate insights on the fly and follow the flow of analysis.
- Data preparation: Compiling data from various sources, identifying dimensions and measurements, and preparing it for data analysis.
Business Intelligence: Examples
The functioning of a business intelligence analyst depends directly on a company’s decision-making process, meaning that each company sets goals and must find the best way to achieve them. This requires asking questions about both the past and the future. Today, the answers to these questions are found through data analysis. After finding the answers, companies can determine the actions needed to achieve their objectives.
Data is collected from all business activities such as marketing, advertising, and sales, then stored and accessed by users to conduct analyses that will answer the company’s questions. Business intelligence works alongside Data Analytics and Business Analytics, which involve data analysis and business analysis, respectively. Business intelligence is designed to draw conclusions from data analysis, and business analytics is a part of this broader strategy. Analysts use data to identify future patterns and answer the chain of questions that instinctively arise.
Business Intelligence Software
In general, a business intelligence solution is a combination of strategy and technology for collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data from internal and external sources, ultimately providing insights and analytics on the past, present, and future state of the subject being examined. The terms business intelligence and business analytics are often used interchangeably.
However, business analytics specifically refers to the process of examining data to find trends and insights. Modern BI/business analytics solutions offer applications to help you gain actionable insights at every stage of the process. This includes applications for data preparation, analysis, data visualization, reporting, and collaboration for use on-premises, on the desktop, in the cloud, and on the go with mobile capabilities.
Business Intelligence Analyst
A rapidly growing profession, the data analyst is responsible for analyzing information to define strategies for various business processes using business intelligence tools. The business intelligence analyst works with various company managers (from marketing to logistics, production to human resources, and research and development) to identify issues that slow down the business and can be solved through data analysis.
The work of data collection and analysis allows the business intelligence analyst to support companies in making strategic changes to maintain competitiveness. Data sources today are varied and numerous, ranging from management software houses and internal databases to social media. These are the well-known business intelligence big data. All data comes in different formats (numbers, documents, photos, videos, audio, etc.), which must be processed and organized to extract useful and readable information. This is the work of the data analyst: to make this mass of data structured and interpretable by the company’s management.
