What is Business Intelligence ?

The key to achieve success in today’s world is to stay ahead of your competitors. For staying ahead , intelligent decisions are required which should be based on accurate data but not on intuition. Data analysis, reporting and dashboards can help to get the valuable information to give intelligent solutions for business. Collectively all these comes under Business Intelligence widely referred as BI.

What is Business Intelligence ?

Business Intelligence is the application, Technology and processes for gathering, sorting, Analyzing, Presenting and providing access to data to help users make better decisions

Business Intelligence Includes :

• Query, reporting and Dashboards
• Online Analytic Processing (OLAP)
• Statistical Analysis
• Forecasting
• Data Mining

Business Intelligence can be :

• Mission critical or Occasional
• Enterprise wide or local to a division, department or project
• Centrally initiated or driven by user demand

Why is Business Intelligence needed ?

We have discussed about What is Business Intelligence ? Now we will move our focus to Why is BI needed ? So any organisation which wants to stay ahead in competition need to analyze data properly and  this is done by BI .
There are several factors which forces company to use BI which are listed below :

1. Competitive Market : In this era of competition, every organization is under immense pressure to perform better than other companies.
2. Volatile Market : Customer demand is changing rapidly and to stay ahead in market is a tough task. This can be achieved by having right product at right place at right price.
3. Data Volume : Every organization has large volume of data. For analyzing large volume of data, advanced BI tools are required.
4. Response Time : To shrink the response time  to analyze data and produce effective business decisions.

Benefits Of Business Intelligence :

We have already discussed about need of business intelligence. Further more , listed below are the benefits of Business Intelliegence :

1. Reduced Labor Cost : BI system reduces the labor cost by automating data collection and aggregation , automating generation of reports, scheduling reports .
2. Reduced Information Bottlenecks : BI system reduces Information bottlenecks by providing role based dashboards, allowing end user to open and run report, allowing end user to analyze and validate the data .
3. Intelligent Decisions : BI system helps in taking better decisions by providing adequate and up to date data  and allowing decision makers to analyze data.
4. Quick Decisions : BI helps in taking faster decision by combining data from multiple sources and providing various types of reports.

BI Tools :

Since the BI system has become such an important part of organisation’s decision making process, various BI tools have evolved in market. Some of the most famous BI tools are :

1. Cognos
2. Business Objects
3. Pentaho BI Suite
4. MicroStrategy
5. Webfocus
6. Tableau
7. SAS
8. SAP Netweaver Business Intelligence

I have tried to give a brief overview about BI. Soon I will be writing more about BI tools.
Thanks for reading.