Business intelligence gives organizations the ability to ask questions in simple language and get answers they can understand. Instead of using the best guesses, they can base their decisions on what their business data tells them, whether in relation to production, supply chain, customers, or market trends. The general objective 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, alerting them to problems and possible improvements.
Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven process for analyzing data and providing actionable information that helps executives, managers, and workers make informed business decisions. Self-service business intelligence environments allow business users to query BI data, create data visualizations, and design control panels themselves. Keep in mind that artificial intelligence and machine learning will continue to grow, and that companies can integrate AI insights into a broader BI strategy. For example, BI includes tools for sharing data and managing projects that facilitate collaboration, something that has become vital for encouraging teamwork and maintaining productivity in the workplace, especially at a time when employees are forced to work from home.
Modern business intelligence solutions prioritize flexible self-service analysis, data governed on trusted platforms, empowered business users, and speed to obtain information. This allows companies to use BI functions more quickly and refine or modify development plans as business needs change or new requirements arise. Business intelligence can also help organize teams, keeping them abreast of key performance indicators (KPIs).As part of the BI process, organizations collect data from internal IT systems and external sources, prepare it for analysis, query the data, and create data visualizations, BI dashboards, and reports to make analysis results available to business users for operational decision-making and strategic planning. This separation between business intelligence and business analysis can help determine what type of functionality you want a BI tool to have and which can be omitted.
It was formerly known as Zoho Reports, which was redesigned to make it a more robust cloud-hosted platform that includes online reporting, detailed analysis, and self-service business intelligence. For example, financial services firm Charles Schwab used business intelligence to obtain a comprehensive view of all its branches in the United States to understand performance metrics and identify areas of opportunity. All of these things come together to create a comprehensive vision of a company that helps people make better, practical decisions. Access to a central business intelligence platform allowed Schwab to gather data from its branches into a single view.
To understand these advanced techniques, specialized business knowledge and statistics are still required to correctly interpret what the algorithms find. If you're just starting your journey into the world of business intelligence (BI), this helpful guide is for you. This access to information helps users support business decisions with concrete numbers instead of instincts and anecdotes.
