What is Business Intelligence ?

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Companies, big and small, often face many challenges when operating in their business environments. Challenges that require informed decision-making in order to address them correctly. For example, A firm may face declining sales in a certain region, however, this may not be apparent due to a lack of clear visibility; or a competitor may have raised their prices on a premium product, causing a business to miss potential revenue; or increased delays in transportation in its supply chain.

Enter Business Intelligence, usually abbreviated as B.I

Business Intelligence is the process of using data to answer business questions in order to produce a call to action.

Management, Team leaders and team members, need to have sufficient information before taking any course of action, otherwise they risk negatively impacting the business. Luckily, in today’s world, businesses generate large amounts of data (Big Data), which can be used to gain insights before making a decision.

The B.I process involves identifying the business requirements, data sources, transforming said data, discovering insights, visualising, and finally presenting and sharing the findings with stakeholders, in order for them to take action.

B.I often falls under Descriptive and Diagnostic analytics – B.I helps us know “What happened ?” and “Why did it happen ?”. In that sense, it is a backward-looking or historical form of analytics.

It is often real-time or near real time which allows for stakeholders to react quickly to any changes in the internal or external environment.

Some benefits of B.I include

• Improved reaction time towards business events.
• Proactive (preventative) measures before business events happen.
• Performance overview of the business (usually in the form of KPI’s).
• Enhanced operational efficiencies.

In order for companies to maximise the benefits of business intelligence, they need to have a well thought out B.I Strategy which may fall under a companies overall (Big) data strategy.