What Is Business Intelligence?

Businesses must stay ahead of the competition and make informed decisions that improve their business operations – otherwise, they will quickly be overrun and kicked to the curb. One way to do this is with data and business intelligence tools.

But what is business intelligence? What are the benefits of using it for your company? How do you go about implementing it?

Read: The State of the Modern Workplace

What Is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence, or BI, is a range of tools and processes that enable a business to collect raw data before analyzing and interpreting it to detect valuable insights so key stakeholders can then make informed data-driven and actionable decisions. The ultimate goal of using BI is to leverage data and provide a bird’s-eye view of the organization to drive change and eliminate inefficiencies – we’ll cover more of these advantages below.

The raw data consists of historical and real-time structured and unstructured data; it’s gathered from internal and external sources for integration, consolidation and storage in data warehouses, or central locations, that users can easily access. From here, the data is translated into meaningful information that can identify trends and patterns and forecast future outcomes, as well as identify problems or inconsistencies that need addressing. These insights can then be transformed into easy-to-understand representations via data visualizations, dashboards and reports that aid users in drawing conclusions and making decisions based on the factual data.

See, before BI, key stakeholders were left to base significant business decisions on their accumulated knowledge and previous experience, as well as intuition or gut feelings. However, this inaccurate and incomplete information often led to errors and missteps since they lacked the data to see the big picture. With BI, these stakeholders can now find the answers to their questions by looking at their current business processes and strategies.

What Does BI Consist of?

BI incorporates a variety of analytics, statistics and data management and reporting tools that access and analyze the data and then present the findings, so the user has detailed insights into the current state of the business.

These tools include:

• Applied, business, descriptive, predictive, prescriptive and statistical analytics
• Collaborative BI (combining BI applications and collaboration tools so different users can work together)
• Dashboards and data visualization (aggregating data into one place, often in the form of reports, charts, graphs, maps, summaries or spreadsheets)
• Data mining (using databases, statistics, AI and machine learning to uncover patterns and trends)
• Data and process modeling
• Embedded BI (integrating BO into business applications to enhance and extend reporting abilities)
• Extract-transfer-loads
• Mobile BI (when BI applications and dashboards are available on smartphones and tablets)
• Online analytical processing (OLAP – analyzing datasets from different angles)
• Performance metrics and benchmarking (comparing current performance data to historical data to track performance toward business goals)
• Text mining

When choosing tools, you should pick ones with key features that will align with and benefit your organization’s BI goals – ensure everyone has access to them and can easily use them.

The Many Benefits of Utilizing BI

Besides improving your decision-making process with accurate data, tons of benefits come with utilizing BI.

1. Increased efficiency and productivity: The biggest benefit of BI is increasing your business operation efficiency and productivity. With holistic views and factual data to back your decisions, C-level executives and managers can monitor business performance to streamline processes and optimize workflow.
2. Better analysis: By condensing the data into visual representations, you can improve reporting efficiency and share the information quickly across departments.
3. Improved employee satisfaction and morale: By letting employees access the BI data, they can reduce friction and facilitate faster results within their departments. You can also capture insights about employees to optimize HR processes and recruitment.
4. Identify emerging business and market trends: Tracking sales, marketing and financial performances can help pinpoint trends and updates.
5. Drive sales and new revenues: By increasing sales and finding new revenue streams, you can identify areas of future growth and tap into those markets.
6. Increase your competitive edge: You can easily beat out the competition by monitoring the changing market and its trends, anticipating your customers’ needs and preferences and acting on emerging opportunities.
7. Improved customer experience: By looking at customer behavior and shopping patterns, you can change marketing, sales and customer service efforts to make them more personalized and effective, creating a better overall customer experience. You can also improve product quality and better target customers.
8. Identify and reduce inefficiencies: Whether it’s identifying distribution bottlenecks, eliminating waste or reducing cybersecurity compliance risks, BI can help highlight inefficiencies and vulnerabilities in your company.

Thriveon and BI

Implementing BI into your workplace can be a difficult task – the time-consuming mission is often enough to deter businesses when they should be embracing BI. Businesses have also been looking for and paying for better data reporting for years - a large percentage of IT spending usually goes towards getting the data out of the company's system and putting it in a usable format that doesn't involve overly complex report writing. 

It doesn't have to be that way.

Thriveon can help you get the information you need without the complexity and cost. Our hassle-free professional IT project services follow a standardized, proven process, meaning we’ll keep your company on budget and on time so you can achieve your desired outcomes and goals.

Schedule a consultation with us today.

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Is your business maximizing the benefits of business intelligence or falling behind? Take the assessment below and find out how your business stacks up on BI and the other important advantages of digital transformation.