Business intelligence (BI) is a powerful tool that can help organizations make better decisions based on data. It uses a combination of business analysis, data mining, data visualization and data tools to collect and present business data in an easy-to-understand format, such as reports, dashboards, tables and graphs. BI tools allow users to access different types of historical and current, internal and third-party data, as well as semi-structured and unstructured data, such as social networks. This information can be used to analyze the company's performance and identify trends and patterns.
A data warehouse is essential for business intelligence solutions. It accumulates information from multiple sources to support analysis and reporting. BI software consults the warehouse to obtain, transform and visualize data to present the results in panels and reports. Business intelligence encompasses the processes that collect data and convert it into images, reports and dashboards to identify trends, patterns and points of interest.
Business intelligence can provide valuable insights from historical and current data to improve decisions, identify problems, detect market trends and explore new opportunities to increase revenues. Companies create more and more data every year, so it's increasingly important for them to have a clear view of all their data in order to remain competitive. Self-service BI tools can be used to extract a wealth of information that will help you improve interdepartmental and external communications, problem-solving processes, online data analysis, financial efficiency, goal setting, marketing and profitability. Traditional business intelligence is still a common approach for generating periodic reports and answering static queries.
For example, financial services firm Charles Schwab used business intelligence to gain a complete view of all its branches in the United States in order to understand performance metrics and identify areas of opportunity. HelloFresh, a food kit company, automates reporting processes and allows its teams to create personalized regional marketing campaigns using business intelligence. Business intelligence combines business analysis, data mining, data visualization, data tools and infrastructure, and best practices to help organizations make more informed decisions. This involves accessing the data, analyzing it using different methods and techniques to detect important trends, and presenting it in a way that is immediately understandable to any type of audience.
