Overview
Business Intelligence or BI is the capacity to acquire and apply business knowledge to understand and profit from past experiences. And the internal development and sharing of information to create a competitive advantage.
Data is a key asset, and to get the most value out of it you must get the right information to the right person, in the right form, at the right time in order to allow them to make the right decision.
Business Intelligence tools are increasingly moving from a very simplified view of “slicing and dicing” data into advanced support. For real-time decision-making in the supply chain, demand management, and revenue cycle applications. As new market and demand information has become available. Business Intelligence can enable management to utilize this information to drive better decision-making.
As with most business processes, Business Intelligence is composed of three basic building blocks – people, processes, and technology:
- People
Apply advanced reasoning and knowledge of business processes to information provided out of reporting in order to make informed business decisions. - Processes
Are applied to complete transactions, run the business, and create data that feeds into Business Intelligence. Processes are also applied to data in order to cleanse, organize, and prepare it for use within Business Intelligence tools. - Technology
Supports end users by logically storing and presenting data to end users, and provides mechanisms for further analysis of data sets.
Key benefits of using Business Intelligence Tools
- Provide end-users with timely and accurate information.
- Get better, more complete information out of our systems that help us combine different encounters.
- Design reporting and technology that is powerful, cost-effective, but yet simple to use.
- Give users a single location to get the majority of the required key information from.
- Provide a “centralized system” or a single database that combines all company information into a single frame.
- Create Actionable information with tools that allow users to manage based off of the information provided.
- Allow users at all levels to get the best information needed to perform their day-to-day jobs.
- Better predict and plan for the future based off of increased visibility into where we have been and other trends.
- Allow us to stay competitive on pricing through a full understanding of our existing margins and profitability.
- Enable Management to manage by exception, spending more time analyzing instead of gathering information.
- Build out a platform that will support the future growth of your business for many years to come.
Business Intelligence Strategy
Organizational
The Organizational stream contains initiatives to establish the teams, processes, and governance structures required for Enterprise Business Intelligence. This will require input and support across the organization and will establish roles, responsibilities, and reallocation/hire where necessary.
Technical
The Technical stream contains initiatives to select and establish the technical tools, environments, standards, policies, and procedures for the Business Intelligence capability. Resources will be mostly technical but will involve business stakeholders where decisions have a business impact.
Functional
The Functional stream contains initiatives that will deliver data into the Enterprise Data Warehouse and make that data and reports available to the users across the organization. This focus area is initially responsible for integrating data and building the key reports and dashboards. It will then continue as the steady-state organization for data and reporting.
To read an article about “What is Data Analytics – Introduction & Types | Data Analytics Tools”.