Business intelligence (BI) can be described as the procedural and technical infrastructure that collects, stores, and analyzes the data produced by a business activities.
BI is a broad term that covers data mining, process analysis, performance benchmarking, and descriptive analytics. BI parses all the data produced by a business and presents actionable reports, performance measures, and trends that help management in decision making.
What is Business Intelligence Analysis
Business Intelligence Analysis is the systematic procedure followed in finding business needs. The information on the needs of a business is known as business intelligence.
Who is a Business Intelligence Analyst?
Business Intelligence Analyst is an expert who analysis business data to discover business needs.
Business Intelligence Analysts are classified into different specialties such as Strategy Analyst, Business Architect, System Analyst, Data Analyst.
Read more on Who BI Analyst is and Their Job
Business Intelligence Analysis Process
Business Intelligence analysis is done systematic order. The business intelligence analysis procedure involves:
Get clear information about the business/project.
Defining the business needs.
Focus on the points that need more attention or that are not discussed in detail.
Define the scope to cover and the requirements. Accurate description of requirements is very critical for correct implementation. The broad nature of business analyst makes it cumbersome for analysts to define the scope of business, therefore, carrying out the analysis, the business analysts use their specialty as a Strategy Analyst, Business Architect, or System Analyst in deciding the scope to cover
Discussing the approved requirements with the technical teams for implementing.
Changes required in the project.
Requirements gathering, prioritizing, and describing.
Communicating these requirements and the ways to implement these requirements to the client and technical team.
Adopting appropriate business analysis techniques.
Business Analysis Techniques
Strategic business analysis
Analytical business analysis
Investigative business analysis
Project management and much more.
Understanding Business Intelligence (BI)
The need for BI arose from the fact that managers tend to make worse decisions when the access to only inaccurate, incomplete or misleading information, than if they had better information. Manager tend to make better decisions with complete and accurate information. Financial models formulators recognize this as “garbage in, garbage out.”
Business Intelligence aims at solving this problem by analyzing current data that is ideally presented on a dashboard of quick metrics designed to support better and effective decision making.
Factors to Consider in Business Intelligence
For BI to be useful, it must seek to increase the accuracy, timeliness, and amount of data.
This involves finding more ways to capture accurate information and avoid duplication of data, checking the information for errors, and structuring the information in a way that allows for broad analysis.
In reality, however, companies have data that are in different formats which makes data collection and analysis difficult. To make business intelligence data collection and analysis easy, some software companies now provide business intelligence solutions to optimize the information gleaned from data. These are enterprise-level software applications designed to unify a company’s data and analytics.
Although software solutions continue to evolve and are becoming increasingly sophisticated, data scientists still need to manage the trade-offs between speed and the depth of reporting.
The current use of insights from big data gives companies hard time in capturing everything, but data analysts can usually filter out sources to find a streamlined of data points that are relevant in a process or business area. This can reduce the need to capture and reformat everything for analysis, saving analytical time and increasing the reporting speed.
Business Intelligence Analysis Tools and Software
There are different types of software solution tools used in Business Intelligence Analysis, and they are categorized according to their uses.
They are as follows:
Spreadsheets: Spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel and Google Docs are some of the most widely used BI tools.
Reporting software: Reporting software is used to report, organize, filter, and display data.
Data visualization software: Data visualization software translates datasets into easy-to-read, graphical representations for quick insights.
Data mining tools: Data mining tools "mine" large volume of data for patterns using instruments like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and statistics.
Online analytical processing (OLAP): OLAP tools offer users capabilities to analyze datasets from a wide range of angles based on different business perspectives.
See commonly used BI analysis tools and their functions
Importance of Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence is very important in business as every business make use of BI in their business decision-making at one point or the other. BI can be said to be core business value or heart of business. BI can be useful to companies in the following ways:
To support activities such as compliance, production, marketing, and hiring.
Other benefits companies can experience by adopting BI into their business models include faster, more accurate reporting and analysis, improved data quality, effective decision making, employee satisfaction, costs minimization, and increased revenues, and profits maximization.