BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

 Business Intelligence:

Business Intelligence is a process driven by technology. The procedural and technological framework that acquires, stores, and analyses the data obtained by a company’s activities are known as Business Intelligence (BI) (Investopedia, 2022).

In the business intelligence process organization gets data from external sources and internal IT sources and systems, runs queries, prepares for analysis, and creates data visualizations by running queries against the data, BI reports, and dashboards to make the analytics results used by users for strategic planning and operational decision making.

The primary purpose of BI initiatives is to produce better decisions for organizations to increase business revenue, Analyse customer behaviors, compare data with competitors, optimize operations, improve overall operational efficiency, can analyze market trends, and gain business advantages (techtarget, 2022).

Working process:

Organizations and Businesses have various goals and targets. To analyze the performance against these targets, they obtain significant data and analyze it to take action to meet their goals.

The data collected is processed accordingly and stored in data warehouses, which are accessible to the users for data analysis in the form of reports, charts, and maps.

Industries like Healthcare, Information Technology, and Education have adopted BI. They use essential data to work on their operations (tableau, 2022).

Data warehouses involve an online analytical processing (OLAP) engine to help with multidimensional queries.

"OLAP is a powerful technology which helps in data discovery, predictive analytics, and helps in complex analytic calculations". Says IBM offering manager Doug Dailey in his data warehousing blog (ibm, 2022).

To improve product quality, improvements in processes and customer interactions, OLAP uses calculations and information to drive data.

Importance of BI:

Þ   It Improves ROI by analyzing the company's operations and strategically allocating resources to significant objectives.

Þ   identify customers' preferences, behavior, and trends and use the information to target prospects better.

Þ   Improves business operations and monitors and fixes issues regularly. 

Þ   It helps improve supply chain management by activity monitoring and helps partners and suppliers by communicating the results (Ranjan, 2009).

 

Example: Retailers

The cost saving can be increased by performance comparison across regions, stores, and channels. With excellent visibility in claims processing, insurers can view their issues in service targets and utilize the information for better outcomes (ibm, 2022).

Advantages & Disadvantages of BI (guru99, 2022):

 

Advantages	Disadvantages
Boost productivity	Complexity
Fix Accountability	Limited use
Easy analytics	Time Consuming Implementation
Streamlines business processes	cost

 

Trends in BI:

Artificial Intelligence: Dashboard reporting and real-time data analysis capability.

Collaborative BI: To enhance the sharing and working style among the teams and for decision-making, BI collaborates with social media and other latest technologies.

Embedded BI: To extend and enhance the reporting functionality, BI allows integration with embedded BI, which allows a few of its features to other business applications.

Cloud Analytics: The transition of BI to the cloud has enormous benefits for organizations. Cloud-based analytics will increase significantly (guru99, 2022).

 

BI Improves Key areas:

Operations: Improves by Refining the process, automating the routine analytical tasks, working on inefficiency, process refinement, and increasing productivity.

Sales & Marketing: Analysis of customer behaviors, marketing performances, focused sales and marketing trends, new initiatives and their effects, and driving revenue.

Finance: Improve the company's financial health by calculating the risks, studying historical data, and helping predict trends.

Inventory control: It automates data, analyses, and reports to significantly improve inventory management. Anticipates trends and helps in buying trends, accelerates fulfillment.

Customer experience: It helps to access all the customer data in one place so you can use key resource areas for significant customer engagements and maintain excellent customer relationships.

Security and compliance: Reduce compliance risks. The centralized data is maintained accurately and transparently, so it is easy to uncover errors and security issues (Negash, and Gray, 2008).

 

Real-life BI examples:

Financial services: To make the business agile and significantly responsible, a big financial institution in the UK connected all its data sources and IT staff and enabled business users to create business reports and BI solutions. To improve business efficiency, business teams such as online banking, customer service, branch staffing, and other teams now use BI tools (powerbi, 2022).

Health: Global healthcare solutions have developed a configuration management system in the cloud to provide one source of trust for its inventory and assets to business teams(powerbi, 2022).

Manufacturing: To provide advanced analytics and balanced governance, a cloud-based BI solution is deployed in the cloud by a manufacturing company in the United States. It is cost-effective and gives the IT more information about the data stored and how it is used, managed, and accessed(powerbi, 2022).

REFERENCES:

Guru992022) guru99.com. Available at: https://www.guru99.com/business-intelligence-definition-example.html#trends-in-business-intelligence (Accessed: 20/November/2022).

ibm(2022) ibm.com. Available at: https://www.ibm.com/topics/business-intelligence (Accessed: 20/November/2022).

Investopedia (2022) Investopedia.com. Available at: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/business-intelligence-bi.asp (Accessed: 20/November/2022).

Negash, S. and Gray, P., (2008). Business intelligence. In Handbook on decision support systems 2 (pp. 175-193). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

 

powerbi(2022) powerbi.microsoft.com. Available at:https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/what-is-business-intelligence/ (Accessed: 20/November/2022).

Ranjan, J., (2009). Business intelligence: Concepts, components, techniques and benefits. Journal of theoretical and applied information technology, 9(1), pp.60-70.

tableau(2022) tableau.com. Available at: (https://www.tableau.com/en-gb/learn/articles/business-intelligence)(Accessed: 20/November/2022).

techtarget (2022) techtarget.com. Available at: https://www.techtarget.com/searchbusinessanalytics/definition/business-intelligence-BI (Accessed: 20/November/2022)