What Is the Purpose of Business Intelligence in a Business?

What Is the Purpose of Business Intelligence in a Business?

If you are starting your journey into the world of business intelligence (BI), we’ve come up with this helpful guide. It focuses on the common questions asked by new BI users. We’ve anchored it on the software’s purpose but also go on to explore other pertinent areas such as what it is and what it can do for your business. For a comprehensive look at this type of software, you can head over to our in-depth analysis of business intelligence and learn more about its features, types, and pricing.

What Is Business Intelligence Guide Table of Contents

1. What is Business Intelligence?
2. What Are the Benefits of Using Business Intelligence?
3. Why Should You Use Business Intelligence Systems and Tools?
4. How Does Software Tools Optimize Business Intelligence?
5. What Are Examples of Business Intelligence Software Solutions?
6. Who Should Lead the Way in Implementing Business Intelligence?
7. How Should I Implement a Business Intelligence System?
8. How To Efficiently Roll out Business Intelligence Systems?
9. What Are Potential Business Intelligence Problems?
10. How To Choose The Best Business Intelligence Software?
11. What Are the Latest Trends in Business Intelligence?
12. Can Small Business Use BI Software?

1. What Is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence (BI) refers to the tools, technologies, applications, and practices used to collect, integrate, analyze, and present an organization’s raw data in order to create insightful and actionable business information.BI as a discipline and as a technology-driven process is made up of several related activities, including:

1. Data mining
2. Online analytical processing
3. Querying
4. Reporting

2. What Are the Benefits of Using Business Intelligence?

Since you’re already aware of what is the purpose of Business Intelligence in a business it’s worth tackling the question of what are its main benefits. The potential benefits of business intelligence programs include:

1. Accelerating and improving decision making
2. Optimizing internal business processes
3. Increasing operational efficiency
4. Driving new revenues
5. Gaining competitive advantages over business rivals.
6. Identifying market trends
7. Spotting business problems that need to be addressed

3. Why Should You Use Business Intelligence Systems and Tools?

Business intelligence tools are essentially data-driven Decision Support Systems (DSS). BI is sometimes used interchangeably with briefing books, report and query tools, and executive information systems. With these tools, business people can start analyzing the data themselves, rather than wait for IT to run complex reports. This information access helps users back up business decisions with hard numbers, rather than only gut feelings and anecdotes.

4. How Does Software Tools Optimize Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence software systems provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations, most often using data that has been gathered into a data warehouse or a data mart and occasionally working from operational data. Software elements support reporting, interactive “slice-and-dice” pivot-table analyses, visualization, and statistical data mining. Applications tackle sales, production, financial, and many other sources of business data for purposes that include business performance management. Information is often gathered about other companies in the same industry which is known as benchmarking.

5. What Are Examples of Business Intelligence Software Solutions?

Sisense is a business intelligence platform that lets users join, analyze, and picture out information they require to make better and more intelligent business decisions and craft out workable plans and strategies.

Sisense currently occupies one of the highest spots on our list of top 10 business intelligence apps. After a thorough analysis of its features, our software review experts concluded that this business intelligence solution gives you one of the easiest ways to create insights and business value from complex data. You can read their detailed review of Sisense, discussing its features, pricing and user experience at length.

With Sisense, users can unify all the data they ever need and want into visually appealing dashboards via a drag and drop user interface. Sisense basically allows users to turn data into highly valuable insights and then share them with colleagues, business partners, and clients via interactive dashboards.

Sisense is the leading business intelligence software for many companies, ranging from startups and developing enterprises to Fortune 500 giants including eBay, Sony, ESPN, Comcast, and NASA.

6. Who Should Lead the Way in Implementing Business Intelligence?

Sharing is vital to the success of BI projects because everyone involved in the process must have full access to information to be able to change the ways that they work. BI projects should start with top executives, but the next group of users should be salespeople. Because their job is to increase sales and because they’re often compensated on their ability to do so, they’ll be more likely to embrace any tool that will help them do just that—provided, of course, the tool is easy to use and they trust the information.

With the help of BI systems, employees modify their individual and teamwork practices, which leads to improved performance among the sales teams. When sales executives see a big difference in performance from one team to another, they work to bring the laggard teams up to the level of the leaders.

Once you get salespeople on board, you can use them to help get the rest of your organization on the BI bandwagon. They’ll serve as evangelists, gushing about the power of the tools and how BI is improving their lives.

7. How Should I Implement a Business Intelligence System?

When charting a course for BI, companies should first analyze the way they make decisions and consider the information that executives need to facilitate more confident and more rapid decision-making, as well as how they’d like that information presented to them (for example, as a report, a chart, online, hard copy). Discussions of decision making will drive what information companies need to collect, analyze and publish in their BI systems.

Good BI systems need to give context. It’s not enough that they report sales were X yesterday and Y a year ago that same day. They need to explain what factors influencing the business caused sales to be X one day and Y on the same date the previous year.

Like so many technology projects, BI won’t yield returns if users feel threatened by, or are skeptical of, the technology and refuse to use it as a result. And when it comes to something like BI, which, when implemented strategically, ought to fundamentally change how companies operate and how people make decisions, CIOs need to be extra attentive to users’ feelings.

8. How To Efficiently Roll out Business Intelligence Systems?

• Make sure your data is clean.
• Train users effectively.
• Deploy quickly, then adjust as you go. Don’t spend a huge amount of time up front developing the “perfect” reports because needs will evolve as the business evolves. Deliver reports that provide the most value quickly, and then tweak them.
• Take an integrated approach to building your data warehouse from the beginning. Make sure you’re not locking yourself into an unworkable data strategy further down the road.
• Define ROI clearly before you start. Outline the specific benefits you expect to achieve, then do a reality check every quarter or six months.
• Focus on business objectives.
• Don’t buy business intelligence software because you think you need it. Deploy BI with the idea that there are numbers out there that you need to find, and know roughly where they might be.

9. What Are Potential Business Intelligence Problems?

• User resistance — Implementations can be dogged by cultural challenges.
• Irrelevant and poor quality data — To get accurate insights, you must have standard data. Get your data in good working order before extracting and acting on insights.
• BI tools — The core of BI is reporting, not process management. Be careful not to confuse business intelligence with business analytics.
• Companies don’t understand their business processes well enough — Strive to understand all the activities that make up a particular business process before starting a BI project.

10. How To Choose The Best Business Intelligence Software?

• Analyze how executives make decisions.
• Consider what information executives need in order to facilitate quick, accurate decisions.
• Pay attention to data quality.
• Devise performance metrics that are most relevant to the business.
• Provide the context that influences performance metrics.

Remember, BI is about more than decision support. Due to improvements in the technology and the way CIOs are implementing it, BI now has the potential to transform organizations. CIOs who successfully use BI to improve business processes contribute to their organizations in more far-reaching ways than by implementing basic reporting tools.

11. What Are the Latest Trends in Business Intelligence?

The following are three of the latest trends in the Business Intelligence field:

• The Integration of Data and Content — Currently organizations are starting to see that data and content should not be considered separate aspects of information management, but instead should be managed in an integrated enterprise approach. Enterprise information management brings Business Intelligence and Enterprise Content Management together.
• Operational Business Intelligence — Currently organizations are moving towards Operational Business Intelligence which is currently undeserved and uncontested by vendors. Traditionally, Business Intelligence vendors are targeting only top the pyramid but now there is a paradigm shift moving toward taking Business Intelligence to the bottom of the pyramid with a focus of self-service business intelligence (SSBI).
• Embedded and Conversational Business Intelligence — This is not just ordinary reporting BI software, but advanced integrated reporting and analytics.

12. Can Small Business Use BI Software?

Absolutely! With cloud-hosted and SaaS business intelligence solutions, the software has gone down to affordable levels and within easy reach to organizations of whatever size. Previously an exclusive tool of large corporations able to maintain expensive processors and systems to crunch and analyze big data, today’s BI software tools hosted online are cost-effective solutions that won’t break the bank.

Now, there are even self-service analytics and BI tools you can access and use without the need of IT background to give you answers on your business health and performance as well as identify opportunities and trends to help you make information-driven decisions. In other words, BI has leveled the playing field. You as a small business owner get to use the tools that large businesses also use to gather insights on the market, the business environment, and on their organization. You can read our list of the best business intelligence tools for small and big business to keep you updated.

There is no question on the benefits of business intelligence when it comes to helping you reduce cost, improve revenues, reduce risk, speed up decision and action processes, and gain data visibility across your organization.