What is business intelligence?
The term Business Intelligence – often referred to simply as
BI – was originally coined by Gartner Group who in 1996 wrote:
By 2000, Information Democracy will
emerge in forward-thinking enterprises, with Business Intelligence information
and applications available broadly to employees, consultants, customers,
suppliers, and the public. The key to thriving in a competitive marketplace is
staying ahead of the competition. Making sound business decisions based on
accurate and current information takes more than intuition. Data analysis,
reporting, and query tools can help business users wade through a sea of data
to synthesize valuable information from it - today these tools collectively
fall into a category called "Business Intelligence."
In other words, Business Intelligence (BI) is a terminology
representing a collection of processes, tools and technologies helpful in
achieving more profit by considerably improving the productivity, sales and
service of an enterprise. With the help of BI methods, the corporate data can
be organized, analyzed in a better way and then converted into a useful
knowledge of information needed to initiate a profitable business action. Thus it’s
about turning a raw, collected data into intelligent information by analyzing
and re-arranging the data according to the relationships between the data items
by knowing what data to collect and manage and in what context.
A company's collected raw data is an important asset where
one can find solutions to many of an organization’s critical questions like
'what was the net profit for a particular product last year and what will be
sales this year and what are the key factors to be focused this year in order
to increase the sales?'. So there arises a necessity of a well planned BI
system which can lead to a greater profitability by reducing the operating
costs, increasing the sales and thereby improving the customer satisfaction for
an enterprise.
With the help of a Business Intelligence System, a company
may improve its business or rule over its competitors by exploring and
exploiting its data to know the customer preferences, nature of customers,
supply chains, geographical influences, pricings and how to increase its
overall business efficiency.
Why is business intelligence needed?
BI is about analyzing an organization’s performance in order
to improve its income and competitiveness. Thus, in a sense BI is something
organizations have always been involved with BI on some level. With today’s
modern IT systems however, organizations are collecting ever increasing volumes
of data and it is no longer possible to analyze such data without specialized
tools and methods. The data will not fit inside a person’s head.
Business Intelligence tools let users sip efficiently
through huge amounts in a matter of seconds. Such impressive response times are
not simply given by modern hardware and software. Special architectures and
methods for building such systems are required.
Business Intelligence tools let users sip efficiently
through huge amounts in a matter of seconds. Such impressive response times are
not simply given by modern hardware and software. Special architectures and
methods for building such systems are required.
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