Business Intelligence?

What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence (BI) refers to computer-based techniques used in acquiring, identifying, extracting and analyzing business data. BI technologies provide historical, present and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, business performance management  and predictive analytics.

Business intelligence aims to support better business decision making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system (DSS). Though the term business intelligence is sometimes used as a synonym for competitive intelligence, because they both support decision making, BI uses technologies, processes, and applications to analyze mostly internal, structured data and business processes while competitive intelligence focuses on company competitors. Business intelligence can include the subset of competitive intelligence.

Essential Elements of Business Intelligence

• Speed to value

You have questions now. Get answers now, not in six months or whenever your “quarterly” reports are completed.

• Self-service

BI’s most critical task is to connect information to people. Drill down into data, highlight and filter across data sources, share reports and create interactive dashboards for your entire company. If your BI can’t do that, you might as well not have BI.

• Diverse data

The reality of business today is that data lives in many places: databases, spreadsheets, cubes and text files. BI that doesn’t connect to disparate data isn’t solving real world problems. Mash up your data to see, for example, production trends from your database along with sales targets from Microsoft Excel. Immensely sophisticated but friendly and easy, data integration should be drag-and-drop.

• Huge data = great performance

It’s out there and your BI system should be able to handle it. If it takes more than a few minutes to find data and get the information you need then your tools are letting you down. Large amounts of data should make your business intelligence system better, not worse.

• Best practices in a box

Business intelligence should help you create the right view and give your organization one version of the truth. Does it automatically geocode sales data? Does it suggest how you could look at your data more effectively? Does it include color schemes designed to help you explain your data? If you answered no then your business needs a better solution.

• Easy collaboration

Build a dashboard on the fly and let your colleagues comment. Collaboration should be as easy as opening a link, writing a note or saving a favorite.

• Plug & play

BI should play nice with the rest of your systems, working with your information architecture and abiding by your security protocols. Great solutions work with databases of different brands, cubes and flat files.

• Better decisions, faster

Better and faster decisions. That’s what DataFive provides to our clients.

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Contact us and learn more about how DataFive can deliver the benefits of a top-notch business intelligence solution to your small business.