Business intelligence enables smart business decisions by delivering data-driven insights to executives, managers, and other key stakeholders. As technology continues to influence the business world, it’s essential to understand business intelligence and how it can improve your day-to-day operations.
What is Business Intelligence and How Does it Work?
Business intelligence (BI) is a collection of processes, technologies, strategies, and methodologies used to analyse and transform raw data into actionable information. It provides managers with a comprehensive view of their current state of affairs, enabling them to develop big-picture thinking when making critical business decisions.
Transforming raw data requires a business intelligence tool to merge and query important data and make it simple for non-technical users to understand analytical findings by way of graphs, dashboards, charts and graphs.
With the continued focus and investment in artificial intelligence, business intelligence will improve significantly in the years to come.
Classic vs. Modern Business Intelligence
BI has two types — the classic or traditional BI and the modern or self-service BI — with purpose and ease of use setting these two apart.
When using classic BI, the help of IT professionals is needed to review data and generate reports, as it works on a per-request basis, which slows the process down. Despite this, many organisations still use classic BI for reports that need optimal accuracy.
Modern BI tools, on the other hand, have user-friendly features which allow users to analyse data on their own. This is extremely useful for departments that need quick access to data such as marketing and sales.
In other words, classic BI is ideal to generate highly accurate insights while modern BI is best for quick data extraction focusing on big picture analysis.
Different Types of Business Intelligence
Modern BI empowers businesses to acquire valuable insights even without technical skills. Because of this, many are shifting to these self-service options. Among its solutions include:
- Online analytical processing (OLAP): a technique for solving multidimensional analytical problems. It allows users to identify problems from different viewpoints, making it a practical tool for completing tasks like budgeting and CRM data analysis.
- Data visualization: a tool for transforming complex data into digestible information by using visual aids such as charts, graphs, plots, and histograms.
- Data mining: a technique for uncovering trends and patterns in huge datasets.
- Collaborative BI: the method of merging BI software with other collaboration tools to streamline the sharing process and ensure the same pieces of information are transferred within departments.
- Predictive modelling: it uses statistical techniques to create models for forecasting probabilities and trends.
Aside from these, business intelligence also has other useful features like dashboards, reporting, analysing and forecasting. You can learn more about these features here.
Conclusion
Business intelligence is a powerful tool that allows you to keep up with the fast-changing marketplace, make better decisions, and streamline your processes. Utilize it to come up with better decisions for the growth of your business.
Let Us Help
If your business has a turnover of over $1 million, ABJ Solutions is offering a complimentary one-hour meeting to help answer questions and model critical decisions with you. Get in touch with us today so that we can help guide you through these challenging times.
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