Everything you need to know about Business Intelligence in 2020

Business intelligence (BI) combines business analytics, data visualization, data mining, data tools and infrastructure, and best practices to help organizations make more data-driven decisions. You can get modern business intelligence once you have a comprehensive view of your organization’s data. You can then use that data to eliminate inefficiencies, and quickly adapt to market or supply changes.

Business intelligence (BI) is an umbrella term that covers the processes and methods of gathering, storing, and analyzing data from business operations or activities to optimize performance. These things come together to make a comprehensive view of a business to help people make better, actionable decisions.

Over the last few years, BI has evolved, offering more processes and activities to improve data performance. These processes include data mining, reporting, performance metrics and benchmarking, descriptive analytics, statistical analysis, data preparation and data visualization, and visual analysis.

Business Intelligence in Making Smart Data-driven Decisions

BI can help companies to make better decisions by showing present and past data within their business context. Firms can adopt BI to provide performance and competitor benchmarks to run the organization smoother and more efficiently. Companies can also quickly identify market trends to increase sales or revenue. Effectively used, the right data can help with anything from compliance to hiring efforts.

Following the ways, business intelligence can help companies to make smarter and data-driven decisions:

• Recognize ways to increase profit
• Spot market trends
• Discover issues
• Analyze customer behavior
• Compare data with competitors
• Optimize operations
• Track performance

Business Intelligence Tools and Platforms

Most self-service intelligence tools and platforms streamline the analysis process, which makes it more accessible for people to see and understand their data without the technical knowledge, including how to dig into the data themselves. Let’s look at which platforms are offering ad hoc reporting, data visualization, or customized dashboards to pick out some of the trends in the space.

Tableau

Purchased by Salesforce for USD 15.7 billion at the beginning of August 2019, Tableau, a software company, was founded by researchers from Standford University. Tableau is reputed for the quality of its data visualization capacities. It can make data more human-readable and, as a result, lead to more significant insights. Tableau 2020.3, the latest version of its software, features incorporations with SAP’s HANA database, which grants license and functionality to write to external databases. Tableau offers self-service analytics, allowing customers and partners to make sense data as well. These analytics also provide more clarity and give weight to a company’s claims.

Oracle Business Intelligence

Oracle, a California-based multinational software company, best known for its database solutions, offers a suite of enterprise technology. Founded in 1977, Oracle’s business intelligence is part of its analytics software offering, boasting machine learning collaboration for automation and prediction. It also offers data visualization and integration capabilities. The software is incorporated with the company’s broader Oracle Cloud infrastructure. Oracle frames BI as being a crucial competency for companies to possess, for both optimizing performance and streamlining functions. The company emphasizes its ability to tell stories using its data visualization features to interrogate the data better.

Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI, data analysis software, focuses on business intelligence from which its name derives. The cloud-based software allows data visualization with a focus on incorporation and speed of analysis. Power BI primarily collaborates with Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, passing in data sources for analysis, and pushes the power of visualization. In such a case, Microsoft tends to democratize a company’s data and build a data-driven culture wherein all stakeholders are aware of the data they need to do their jobs best.

Making data human-readable is explicitly a real emphasis that stretches across such solutions. In other words, business intelligence is allowing human leaders to make better decisions by understanding the organization through the data it produces.

Business intelligence is consistently evolving as per business needs and technology. As artificial intelligence and machine learning keeps growing, businesses will integrate the insights from AI into a more comprehensive business intelligence strategy. With companies strive to be more data-driven, efforts to share data and collaboration will increase. Data visualization will even be essential to work together within teams and departments.