Business Intelligence is the ideal way for companies to make data driven decisions. No wonder, the adoption of Business Intelligence tools has reached unprecedented levels.

Starting with the fundamentals of what business intelligence entails, we’ve explored various aspects of technology before examining how it contributes to business intelligence development.

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence comprises the process of locating and evaluating data within a company to make knowledgeable business choices. BI is used to explain how businesses operated in the past and how and why specific results occurred. BI encompasses a wide range of technologies and techniques.

Why should businesses Use BI?

Consider business intelligence if your business suffers from any of the following:

  1. Employees who are underperforming
  2. Customer attrition
  3. Wastage of resources and time
  4. Under/overstocking
  5. Despite generating a lot of data, you are unsure of how to use it.

Data-driven decisions can benefit your business by

  1. Monitoring performance
  2. Optimization of operations
  3. Forecasting trends
  4. Profit maximization through strategic planning
  5. Customer behavior analysis
  6. Data analysis of rivals
  7. Identifying challenges and their solutions

Difference Between Business Analytics vs Business Intelligence

The main difference between business intelligence and business analytics is the emphasis on the timing of events. Business intelligence focuses on the data’s representation of recent and historical occurrences. Business analytics focuses on future events that are most likely to occur.

Business Intelligence: Two Main Categories

Strategic Business Intelligence

Your company’s “Blueprint” for determining how to use data inside its operations is your business intelligence strategy. Picking the appropriate technology and putting in place a software platform won’t be enough to get a return on your investment; therefore, you need a plan.

Operational business intelligence

Operational business intelligence, also known as real-time business intelligence, is a method of data analysis that makes it possible to make choices based on the real-time data that businesses produce and utilize daily.

The Functions of Business Intelligence

To successfully implement a business intelligence plan, data utilization must be well-organized from beginning to end:

  1. A data warehouse is where information from various sources, including both internal and external market data from the organization, is combined and kept.
  2. By developing solid data analysis models, data sets are created and prepared for analysis.
  3. The data analysts later perform queries on the models and data sets.
  4. In addition to BI dashboards and reports, visualizations like graphs, charts, histograms, etc., are also made using the query results.
  5. The decision-makers use the reports to determine what is working and what needs to change to make important business choices.

How to Build a Business Intelligence Plan for Your Business?

In the early stages, you’ll need to decide how data will be utilized, identify essential roles, and define responsibilities. It can appear straightforward, but the secret to success is to start with business goals.

Here’s how you build a business intelligence plan from the bottom up:

  1. Understand your company’s strategy and objectives.
  2. Determine essential stakeholders.
  3. Select a sponsor from your important stakeholders.
  4. Select a BI platform and tools.
  5. Establish a BI team.
  6. Define your scope.
  7. Make plans for your data infrastructure.
  8. Define your objectives and road map.

Types of Outcomes that can be Obtained via the Implementation of Business Intelligence

The following are the most common outcomes of business intelligence implementation, depending on your needs, the data at your disposal, your tech stack, and the nature of the work at hand:

  1. Ad hoc analytics enables you to create a report from scratch or go deeper into an existing static report to learn about a specific business process or aspect of operations.
  2. Users can extract and query specific data with online analytical processing (OLAP) to study it from various angles.
  3. By accessing operational systems or feeding corporate data into a real-time data warehouse and/or BI system, real-time BI enables users to obtain up-to-the-minute data.
  4. A kind of data analysis known as operational intelligence enables business operations decisions and actions to be based on real-time data.
  5. Business intelligence software and collaboration technologies were combined to create collaborative BI, which supports better data-driven decision-making.
  6. Data visualization and BI dashboards provide quick access to important business information.

Conclusion

We have covered comprehensive information about BI, and the uses of BI differences between business analytics and business intelligence. By applying business intelligence to your new or existing business, it becomes easier to conclude data analysis.

Our BI team provides big data business strategy and extensive data development services to ensure that your organization implements business intelligence in the most efficient way possible. Let NGenious help you with Microsoft Power BI consulting, development, and implementation.