What Can Business Intelligence Do for Your Business?
In the modern business environment, big data is king. But data in itself doesn’t determine whether a business will succeed or not, it must be organized and contextualized in such a way that valuable insights can be gleaned and acted on.
Learn how advanced BI tools can automate this process, integrating evolving technologies like machine learning to help organizations respond to changing conditions articulated by the data they gather.
Business intelligence, or BI, is the process by which organizations collect, organize and contextualize data, often using visualizations to make it easy to understand data-driven insights at a glance. The term originated in the 1960s and has expanded in meaning; today, BI refers to a wide range of data-related activities, including data mining, reporting, visualization, and querying.
“Business intelligence can mean something different at each company, but at the core of it, the BI team is responsible for collecting, managing, and analyzing data in order to drive business insights,” said Kevin Hoe, senior data analyst at business.com. “Many definitions might focus exclusively on the data side of the coin, but the other side is equally important: cross-team collaboration. Having all the data in the world might mean nothing without properly understanding the business context, which only comes from collaborating with teams across the organization.”
While business intelligence is based on the data you collect from myriad sources – accounting software, CRM software, inventory management software, website traffic – a business intelligence tool pulls unstructured data together and packages it in simple, easy-to-understand reports and visualizations. BI software also ensures the data can be easily queried and filtered, helping you to review the information you need when you need it.
“The output of business intelligence is usually a dashboard or some kind of visual means to organize the data as to tell us a story,” said Rosaria Silipo, Ph.D., principal data scientist at KNIME. “That story could be anything: from revenue trend to machinery monitoring, from number of working hours to investment ROIs.”
A good BI tool makes it easy to understand and filter the vast troves of data a business collects. Virtually everyone in an organization should be able to make use of business intelligence – without needing a data scientist to do so.
“The role of business intelligence is to provide you with an easily understandable insight into your data,” Silipo said. “There are many tools that build dashboards and manage data for you. Some of those tools are quite easy to manage, and you need very little additional skills to understand your own data.”
“Business intelligence provides insight about the organization, its customers and its products,” said Travis Fell, product manager for Hypori. “A company uses business intelligence to improve operations, customer service and competitive advantage. ”
Business intelligence can support business objectives by providing a panoramic view of all the information an organization collects and helping key stakeholders make more informed decisions, identify key benchmarks, track metrics, and pull up specific data points on demand.
The most advanced BI systems employ machine learning algorithms, which contextualize vast troves of data, sending alerts and recommendations to decision-makers upon request or when anomalous data is catalogued.
“BI’s role is to really give business context to raw data. Without aggregation context, data is not all that useful,” said Christopher Risher, senior program manager of application management services at Onepath. “A great example is slicing financial transactions that have already been summed by some categorical data, such as a business division. With the division as additional context, we are able to glean how individual practices are doing. Then you can add additional context, such as budget or previous year comparisons.
