Business Intelligence (BI) is a technology which assists businesses to work with large data arrays by preparing, mining, managing and visualizing data. Business Intelligence consists of various tools and provides infrastructure which facilitates data-driven decision making in various industries.
Business Intelligence includes process analysis, descriptive analytics and performance benchmarking. BI parses all the data generated by a business and presents easy-to-digest reports, performance measures, and trends that inform management decisions.
Companies adopt BI for the various benefits that it provides. Here are some key uses of Business Intelligence:
Faster analysis, intuitive dashboards:
BI tools pull in data from multiple sources into a data warehouse, and then analyzes the data according to user queries, drag-and-drop reports, and dashboards. The benefit of business intelligence dashboards is making data analysis easier and intuitive, empowering non-technical users to tell stories with data without having to learn coding.
Increased organizational efficiency:
BI provides leaders with the ability to access data, gain a holistic view of their operations, and benchmark results against the larger organization. With a holistic view of the organization, leaders can identify areas of opportunity.
Data-driven business decisions:
Having accurate data and faster reporting capabilities provides for better business decisions.
Improved customer experience:
Business intelligence can directly impact customer experience and customer satisfaction. For example, Verizon deployed BI systems across multiple departments, creating more than 1,500 dashboards for employees. These dashboards pulled data from operations and text data from customer support chat sessions. Using this data, Verizon was able to identify opportunities to improve customer service and reduce support calls by 43%.
Improved employee satisfaction:
BI systems enable IT departments and analysts to spend less time responding to business user requests. Departments who didn’t have access to their own data without contacting analysts or IT can now jump into data analysis with little training. BI is designed to be scalable, providing data solutions to departments who need it and for employees who crave data.
Trusted and governed data:
BI systems enhance data organization and analysis. In traditional data analysis, different departments’ data is siloed and users have to access several databases to answer their reporting questions. Now, modern BI platforms can combine all of these internal databases with external data sources such as customer data, social data, and even historical weather data into a single data warehouse. Departments across an organization can access the same data at one time.
While these are a few of the most important reasons to employ tools and techniques of Business Intelligence, the bigger picture remains that informed decisions and an efficient work environment showcase immense potential of growth in business.
