Business Intelligence(BI) is a data-driven and technology-driven method of analyzing the business data and visualizing it into useful insights to further help managers, stakeholders and business leaders in easing and enhancing the corporate decision-making. BI is quite effective in making efficient and prompt business decisions as it involves the usage of significant key strategies and technologies, as in:
Also, BI solutions use the historical data and daily deltas from the source to provide a fact-based decision-making. Adoption of BI solutions has grown tremendously in the past 3 years, counting it to nearly 50 percent.
Though Finance sector is a pioneer in BI. However, BI is being widely used across all the industries and sectors, as in Retail, Technology, marketing, inventory, operations, sales etc., now. A quality BI solution accelerates the decision-making and provide holistic insights in one place. A BI solution can be used by everyone across the departments from the stakeholders to senior executives to project managers to sales representatives and other employees, provided, they are granted the required authorizations or access for the data suited for their respective career levels.
Illustrations of BI Solutions in the real world:
Illustration 1: A HR in a company can use BI solutions by performing data analysis on the performance of the employees and further creating Reports out of it. This can help the HR in deciding on the annual appraisals efficiently and with ease.
Illustration 2: A bank manager can use BI solutions for determining its most valued customers and figure out an approach how to work with them to enhance bank’s net revenue.
Illustration 3: A retail company can ask its IT professionals to carry out an analysis on its customers’ daily transactional data using BI solutions to determine the loyalty of its customers.
Illustration 4: A restaurant owner can use BI solutions to gather the daily statistics regarding how many customers it is receiving daily, if the count is increasing or declining and to further analyze its impact on its revenue.
Certainly, we do not have a direct approach for selecting the apt BI tool for our business and this could be quite cumbersome sometimes. However, there are a few features in BI solutions which users ought to consider before finalizing the BI tool that fits best for their requirements and business, based on the services and features they would require. These are:
Business Intelligence Solutions helps the business take the right decision because at the right data without any time-lag or much rework. It helps the corporate firms and other small business sectors in dilating their business by:
BI is often misunderstood with AI(Artificial Intelligence) by many.
Both, Business Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence are certainly distinct, yet, are very complementary to each other at the same time.
AI is the creation of algorithms and models that replicate a human mind, its behavior and its thought-process. It promotes the theory that human intelligence can be easily mimicked into a machine that can perform tasks of all kinds-from simple to complex. It is because of this reason how an AI can take rational and effective decisions.
Whilst, BI is the utilization of technologies, visualization tools to analyze the data to strengthen the decision-making process in a firm.
In a layman’s language, BI focusses and analyzes the historic and present data (what had been collected already) and explains the past and the current scenarios, whereas, AI focusses on the future predictions or results by calculating the behaviors from the past and the present data.
AI is now becoming more aligned towards the traditional analytics practices and firms have initiated leveraging AI to augment various business analytics and business process.
It is also forecasted that 5 years down the lane, AI, BI and ML(Machine Learning) is going to capture most of the global economic market. And this is quite evident from the fact that many companies have already started using Intelligence techniques and tools for their business expansion.
Implementation of Business Intelligent system is a real wise decision any firm can make today to flourish their business immensely and with much ease.