Technology is driving our lives today and from the phones in hands to sophisticated computing technology out there, digitalization has taken over the world by storm so to speak. Business intelligence or BI refers to practices, applications, and technologies put together for integration, collection, analysis, and the presentation of critical business information. This crucial business information helps the managers, executives and the collective C-Suite to make data driven and informed decisions. Internal and external resources are tapped into by businesses with the business intelligence tools and methodologies to create dashboards and virtualization of data that help in strategic business decisions.
Importance of Business Intelligence Today
Businesses realize the immense value that critical data can provide in strategic decision making. Business intelligence accesses the data inside and outside of a firm to create the right reports that ultimately convert in profitability for a business. There is a crazy amount of competition that is going on in the global markets, and so businesses need to be prepared for the future. This means that the right decisions need to be taken in the present so that the business can be profitable in future. How do you know the trends? Well, the data from the past gives valuable insights that convert into actionable steps for a business. When implemented right, business intelligence helps companies to increase revenue, sales, productivity, and an increased growth. Some other benefits are:
- Optimize internal business process
- Increase revenue in your business
- Accelerate and improve the business making process
- Enhance efficiency in business operations
- Gain competitive advantages
- Help company to identify and understand market trends
- Spot flaws or problems in business and address them
A tactical and strategic decision making process helps businesses to take their process to the next level.
Interesting Fact: Initially, the BI tools were widely used by the data analysts and other IT professionals. These professionals produced reports and shared the results with the business owners. The trend shifted to business using the BI tools for themselves. We can thank the dashboards and data discovery tools. Business intelligence and analytics software is valued at a whopping $54.1 billion and is expected to grow at 11.2% CAGR by 2022.
Wide Array of Business Intelligence Tools
There are a wide array of business intelligence tools targeting a broad spectrum of industries and processes. Let’s take a look at some of them:
Ad hoc analytics: This business tool is used when you have a single and specific business question. It eliminated the need for a user to wait for a scheduled report as they can extract the information from a smaller set of data.
Online Analytical Processing: Widely known as OLAP in the industry, this is a computing approach that helps users to easily and effectively extract the data and then query it to analyze it from varied perspectives. These are often used in financial reporting, trends analysis, budgeting, sales forecasting and other such planning purposes.
Mobile BI: As the name suggests, this tool can be used on mobile devices. The mobile BI optimizes the reports so that it can be easily viewed on the mobile screens. With the help of simple graphs, charts, and sparklines the KPIs and alerts can be viewed on small screens. The executives using mobile can make decisions on the fly with the ease of viewing current reports.
Real Time BI: Realtime data and insights help executives to get data every minute. The tool accesses the operational data warehouse and the business intelligence system. Data federation, data virtualization, enterprise information integration, service oriented architecture, enterprise application integration, and other such real time BI can be enabled using this BI tool.
Some of the other similar applications are operational BI, SaaS BI, collaborative BI, location intelligence, and a long list of such possibilities are explored as well.
Visual Presentation of Data a Boon
Data visualization tools have become a boon for businesses in modern times. Some leading industries had explored the visual data tools in early stages but many traditional BI companies followed them later on. Nowadays, visual data discovery has become crucial in almost every leading BI tool. Businesses benefit from the advanced benefits received from predictive analytics, data mining, statistical analytics, text mining, and big data analytics.
The BI Programs Process
The intelligent data is stored in data warehouses or in smaller data stores that are designed to store company’s information. In addition to that, there are also hadoop systems that are used within the BI architecture, and these systems work as landing pads or repositories for analytical and BI data. Hadoop systems are especially used for unstructured data, sensor data, log files, and other big data files as well.
Data integration and data quality tools are used to integrate, clean and consolidate the raw data before it is used in the BI applications. This helps to deliver accurate and consistent data to the users.
Business Intelligence in Big Data
Business intelligence is increasingly being used as the front end interface in the big data systems. Advanced business intelligence software enables the flexible back ends and this helps to connect with a wide array of data sources. This flexibility comes along with simple business intelligence user interface and a combination of these make it a great fit for the business data architecture. Even if there is a diverse range of data sitting in the big data warehouses, the tools such as hadoop, NoSQL databases, and cloud platforms helps the users get a unified view. So rather than spending time and efforts to make the data intelligible, the tools help give a unified view.
This makes it simple for executives to get the intelligible data within a short time frame. Now rather than relying on select few highly specialized data architects who have insights into the data, the executives can easily access the simple big data front ends.
Business Intelligence Trend 2020
A growing number of businesses understand the importance of business intelligence and are implementing the same in their business. Rather than relying on the traditional waterfall development, businesses are moving towards Agile BI development and warehousing approaches. Agile development helps deliver the software on an incremental and iterative basis. The new functions and features are added with every iteration and the program is developed in a progressive manner. This helps businesses to quickly implement the BI functionality in their process and the features can be refined or modified as and when the new marketing trends emerge or development plans are changed within the business.
Codetru: Experienced Business Intelligence Developers
At Codetrue, we are a team of expert software developers with years of experience in developing business intelligence systems for medium and large enterprises. We understand the pain points of a business and only then deliver a custom solution to our clients. We are working with a long list of clients from years to deliver BI solutions that enable them to keep up with the modern business requirements. Are you looking for a solution in business intelligence? Our team will be happy to understand your challenges and deliver effective solutions to you. Let’s touch base and take this discussion forward.
