What is business intelligence? Transforming data into business insights

What exactly is business intelligence?

Business Intelligence (BI) refers to the development of programs or software that aids in the transformation of the gathered and analyzed data to form insights capable of driving actions for the purpose of allowing the organization to make quick and better quality decisions related to the organization's strategies and tactics. The tools used in BI allow the accessing and analysis of data volumes and thus presents the insights obtained in various forms of representation like with charts, reports, and graphs to deliver detailed information about the current scenario of the organization. The wide variety of tools that are based on the accessible data and used for providing immediate and ready-to-go insights about the current scenario of the organization are also covered under the term of business intelligence. It also strives for the creation of insights which are understood even by non-specialized counterparts of the organization and allows them to use the data for making reports.

 

Where can it be used?

Although it does not help in predicting what business users should do or the consequences of the chosen path, it also does not solely deal with the generation of reports. Rather, it deals with offering ways for the examination of data for the understanding of trends and deriving insights by converging the efforts which are required for the searching, merging and querying of the necessary data for the making of quality decisions.

Examples of situations where business intelligence can be used are:

●       It can be used by a company to improve its supply chain to understand the reasons for delays and the existence of variabilities. It can also help to understand which products are commonly delayed or the involvement of delay in transportation.

●       It can be used for improving the sales generated, and reduction of costs involved, and also for the automatic generation of delivery and sales reports.

●       School ecosystems can use it for the examination of attendance rates of students or faculty and also for improving student performance to help with learning.

●       A cooperative can use it for tracking member accession and retention.

 

Differences between business intelligence and business analytics:

Business intelligence provides information about the current state and also the conditions of the past and so it is of a descriptive nature. On the other hand, business analytics incorporates various techniques for data analysis and therefore, it is of predictive nature because its goal is describing future conditions and it is prescriptive in nature by aiming to provide insights on what should be done to achieve better results. It should also be mentioned that business analytics is usually part of a wider category field known as data analytics which is focused on insights from the business. Another distinction between business intelligence and business analytics, apart from the time reference mentioned above, is that business intelligence focuses on delivering direct-to-use insights about the current scenario of business affairs to the management, whereas the advice and projections made by business analytics cannot be directly used and the analysis and interpretation by data scientists are required.

 

Resource box:

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