An Introduction to Business Intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) can empower organisations and add value to almost any business process. Here we explore how BI is helping organisations optimise their internal processes and deliver strategic advantages over their competitors.

Business intelligence (BI) refers to those systems, tools and technologies used by organisations to manage, visualise and extract valuable insights from their raw business data. BI software helps users reveal trends and patterns in data that might otherwise remain hidden to them. With BI technology, businesses can gain a better understanding of their market and customers and utilise the data being captured to improve their operations.

With advancements in machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI), the applications for BI are almost limitless, today organisations are able to more accurately track business performance, share real-time opportunities and discover a wealth of insights from their data. Here we explore some of the key ways BI is being used to help companies gain a competitive market edge.

BI uses data to answer: 

• What happened? 
• Why did it happen?
• What will happen next?
• What can be done?

With these insights, a business can:

• Create forecasts
• Identify connections between data sources
• Surface performance metrics and KPIs
• Mine data for new opportunities
• Identify current trends

When the results have been developed, users are able to generate a range of insights in the form of reports, dashboards, and data visualisations. These data-driven insights can then be collated to help organisation leaders make informed decisions about the strategic direction of their company.

Like all technology, BI is designed to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of operations while minimising the amount of human error. What makes BI so valuable is that it can sort through large amounts of data to develop accurate insights faster than any human can. Because BI can identify relevant market patterns and behaviours in a fraction of the time, businesses can be prepared to act on opportunities when they come, rather than reacting too late and risk missing out.

Benefits of BI can include:

• Optimising and improving internal business processes
• Increasing operational efficiency and reduce operation costs
• Identifying new opportunities and revenue streams
• Spotting and addresses problems in the business

It is common to mistake business intelligence with business analytics. While both use advanced and augmented analytics, BI considers the present in its data while BA will only identify and review past business trends to predict future trends.

BA may include:

• Data mining
• Predictive analytics
• Text mining
• Statistical analysis
• Big data analytics

Because they are different, businesses will use both processes to develop strategic plans for their operations, with BI helping with the short term and BA helping to create proactive long-term solutions.