Business Intelligence

As per the definition by (Gartner) “BI is an umbrella term that includes the applications, infrastructure, tools, and best practices that enable access to and analysis of information to improve and optimize decisions and performance” (Gartner).

Business Intelligence is the ability to obtain accurate information about one’s business operations. It enables stakeholders to measure what operations are performing well, where there are efficiencies and allows management to make informed decisions. The goal of Business Intelligence is to provide reliable insight for decision-making. A number of methods exist for gathering the data needed for this purpose. These include dashboards, charts, graphs, reports, and, more recently, predictive analytics. The most valuable type of data, however, is information that allows for the extraction of valuable information

This valuable information can range from simple “statistical” data to more complex variations in any number of variables. Some examples are trend analysis, to examine the change in trend over time, or assessing the performance of business units to identify trends. The goal of BI is not only to extract valuable information but also to share it with your stakeholders. The ability to extract that valuable information makes BI valuable for managers and other staff.

The reason for this is quite simple. Organizations are made up of departments. People with different roles, responsibilities, and even titles operate within the same hierarchical structure. This makes communicating on an individual basis extremely difficult.

 Business Intelligence can help facilitate this sharing of information by providing personalized dashboards, reports, charts, etc… to each of your stakeholders on whatever data he/she requests.

BI is meant to be beneficial to the organization as a whole and for individuals within the organization. It is common for people in charge of data extraction to focus their efforts on doing so in ways that yield high-quality data. For example, they may seek out all the low-hanging fruit in the data to analyze it for trends. This means valuable information can be overlooked, lost, or even ignored in favor of unimportant information.

Focusing only on the key information that is necessary for making decisions. This will allows data analysts to dedicate more time and effort to extracting valuable information for each group member or business unit. Business intelligence is all about collecting data that is both pertinent to your company and measurable. Once you have this information, it can be used to make real-time decisions using the best practices for the industry. Whether you are dealing with a large or small company does not matter. AI can be used to help take your business to the next level.