In the twenty-first century corporates need to cope with an excess of data, understanding “how to use information” has become essential for organizations of all sizes. By transforming data into insightful knowledge, businesses may make more informed decisions. This process is known as business intelligence or BI.
What is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence is the techniques and approaches that can be used to gather and analyse data to gain valuable and useful information. To alter decision-making, enhance operation, and organisational growth, these insights are applied. BI is the process of gathering data from multiple organisational activities, and converting it into data reports, dashboards and visualisations that are easier to understand.
The Importance of Business Intelligence
The use of BI is mainly to help facilitate decision making. Using BI tools organisations are able to analyse the performance data, trends, and provide insights on how to increase efficiency. For instance, a retail industry might employ them to identify customers buying behaviour, or manage stock levels and sales.
Another supportable benefit of BI is that it facilitates an organisation’s achievement of a competitive advantage. This is because by recognising market trends and customer behaviour organisations are in a better position to avoid potential risks while embracing other opportunities in the market.
Core Components of Business Intelligence
Data Collection: The process is initiated through collection of qualitative as well as quantitative data which can be internal (such as from inside the company sales, finance and operation teams) or external (such as market and customer feedback).
Data Storage: Information is kept in a data warehouse or database from where it can be retrieved for usage. These storage systems help keep data properly stored and easily retrievable for use at a later time.
Data Analysis: There’s statistical analysis, data mining, and machine learning which experts apply in analysing the data collected through research.
Reporting and Visualisation: The analysed data is in the form of reports, charts, dice and various dashboards that give a chance to the users to interpret the result easily.
How Business Intelligence Works
Business intelligence systems work by gathering information from several locations inside a company and turning it into a usable form.
Here’s a detailed overview:
Data Extraction: This is collected straight from various sources like customers records, sales stats, transactions, etc.
Data Transformation: The raw data is then preprocessed to further enhance it and channel it into a standardised format for analytical purposes.
Data Analysis: To analyse the data, more specifically, it is BI tools use algorithms that search for patterns, trends and relations within this data.
Data Presentation: Last of all, the findings are summarised so that the target users can make sense of them and actually implement the end solutions. This could be a sales dashboard, a financial report or a chart which shows the segregation of customers at a business organisation.
BI Tools and Software
There are so many BI tools developed to date that suit different data and analytics needs that an organisation may have.
Some of the most popular include:
Microsoft Power BI: A simple software that users can work on for interactive reports and dashboards.
Tableau: While it is highly recognised for its data visualisation, making it easy to design complex graphs and charts, Tableau.
QlikView: A discovery and analysis tool that allows users access to advanced visualisation techniques.
These tools enable users to log into different data sources, perform data analytics on large amounts of data and generate coherent reports to inform decisions.
Benefits of Learning Business Intelligence
In-demand Skills: BI is a relatively new subject as various organisations have been looking for executives capable of analysing the data and giving interpretations.
Improved Decision-Making: It is never too early to start applying BI to contribute to strategic solutions within any type of organisation.
Career Opportunities: BI skills lead to career opportunities such as data analyst, Business Intelligence Consultant and data scientist.
Conclusion
BI is then a crucial aspect of business today as it provides the necessary information one needs for management decisions. From being in your first job to wanting a change, it is crucial to familiarise yourself with the basics of BI and how it can help you stand out in the job market. The London School of Emerging Technology (LSET) offers its guided Business Intelligence course, where you can learn about the different aspects of BI and get a chance to intern and apply your in-depth knowledge.