Common functions of business intelligence technologies include reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, panel development, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics. The overall goal of business intelligence is to enable a company to make informed decisions. A company with a BI strategy that works will have accurate, complete, and organized data. Business intelligence can be used to show historical patterns to help stakeholders assess the state of their organization and alert them to problems and potential improvements.
Business intelligence includes data analysis and business analysis, but it only uses them as part of the entire process. BI helps users draw conclusions from data analysis. Data scientists analyze the details of the data and use advanced statistics and predictive analytics to discover patterns and forecast future patterns. BI programs often incorporate advanced forms of analysis, such as data mining, predictive analysis, text mining, statistical analysis, and big data analysis.
A common example is predictive modeling, which allows the hypothetical analysis of different business scenarios. However, in most cases, advanced analytics projects are carried out by independent teams of data scientists, statisticians, predictive modelers, and other professionals who specialize in analytics, while BI teams oversee the simpler query and analysis of business data. This separation between business intelligence and business analytics can help reduce the types of functionality you want a BI tool to have and those that can be omitted. Understanding these advanced techniques still requires specialized business knowledge and statistics to correctly interpret what the algorithms find.
To prevent these types of events from happening, it would be advisable to evaluate business intelligence software that is positioned as implementable in modern companies. While business intelligence technologies have several functions, their primary function is to support the company's decision-making process and to help knowledge workers, such as managers and research analysts, make better and faster decisions. Business intelligence applications with unique and important features can be purchased separately from third-party vendors or as part of a single business intelligence platform. In the context of business intelligence, data visualizations are interactive representations and techniques that are shown as visual objects, whose purpose is to clearly communicate the importance of data to those who see it.
While products that collect and store data are important parts of the BI process, they're usually not what people think of them when it comes to business intelligence. BI is more than just software, it's a way to maintain a holistic, real-time view of all relevant business data. In other cases, business analytics is used more narrowly to refer to advanced analytics or, more broadly, to include both that analytics and BI. In addition to BI managers, business intelligence teams often include a combination of BI architects, BI developers, BI analysts, and BI specialists who work closely with data architects, data engineers, and other data management professionals.
Having a functional data channel for data collection and storage is a prerequisite for performing data analyses. BI initiatives also offer more limited business benefits, including making it easier for project managers to track the status of business projects and making it easier for organizations to gather competitive information about their rivals. Keep in mind that artificial intelligence and machine learning will continue to grow, and companies can integrate AI insights into a larger BI strategy.
