Business Intelligence! Have you heard the term before? Well, it is the new emerging trend in the business world that help businesses grow in a smarter way. Business Intelligence is a process by which enterprises uses strategies and technologies for analyzing data whether current data or past years, with the objective of making more improvised strategies and improving profits. It also includes us of various software to present all the data in a user-friendly manner like graphs, charts, reports, etc. Business Intelligence enables users to access different types of data – historical, current, third-party, in-house as well as semi-structured and unstructured data also. Users can use this information to analyze how business is performing.
The term Business Intelligence often refer to a range of tool that provides insight into an organization’s current situation, based on available data. Organizations can use this insight gained from Business Intelligence to improve business decisions, find out problem issues, spot new market trends,s and find new opportunities.
We can that Business Intelligence combines data gathering, and data analysis to evaluate complex data into a meaningful and actionable piece of information that can be used to make more effective strategies.

Business Intelligence Techniques

Business Intelligence practice uses many techniques to help businesses draw conclusions. It is a continuous process, the multifaceted cycle of data exploration and information sharing. Common Business Intelligence function includes.

1. Data Mining – sorting through the large databases to make meaningful information.
2. Querying – request for specific data from the database.
3. Data preparation – preparing and organizing data in a user-friendly manner and preparing it for analysis.
4. Reporting – sharing the report to the concerned authorities to make more effective strategies and make decisions
5. Benchmarking – comparing the current business processes and the performances to the previous one drawing conclusions based on this to decide a better strategy for the business
6. Statistical analysis – collecting the results from descriptive analysis by applying statistics in order to find the latest trend.

What are Business Intelligence Tool?

There are a lot of Business Intelligence tools available that empower businesses to gain insight into their market and improve performance. Such Business Intelligence tools include :

• Ad Hoc Analytics – an analysis process designed to answer specific questions on the spot.
• Online Analytic Processing – a computing method that enables multi-dimensional analytical queries.
• Mobile BI – a software that optimizes desktop business intelligence for mobile devices.
• Operational BI – a data analysis approach that uses real-time business analytics to automatically integrate real-time data into the operating system for immediate use.
• Software as a Service BI – a cloud hosting, subscription-based delivery model for business intelligence software solutions.
• Location Intelligence – software that is designed to relate geographic contexts to business data.
• Data Visualization Software – facilitates the detection of patterns and correlations by providing visual context.

Benefits of Business Intelligence

The importance of Business Intelligence is growing day by day as businesses face the ever-increasing flow of raw data and the challenges of gaining insight from an enormous volume of data. With the use of Business Intelligence techniques, businesses can gain insight into the growth of their business. It can help make more effective strategies for better business growth. Business Intelligence gives organizations the ability to ask questions in plain language and get answers they can understand.
Why are sales dropping in a particular region? Where do we have excess inventory? What are customers’ reviews on social media? BI can help answer these critical questions.
BI can provide past and current insight into the business. BI provides an organization means to design business strategies based on factual data. They can –

• Improve ROI by understanding the business and intelligently allocating resources to meet objectives.
• Understand customers’ preferences, behaviors and trends.
• Monitor business operations and accordingly decide strategies to meet the market requirement.
• Improve supply chain management.

It is clear from the above discussion how important is business intelligence to us. Every business needs business intelligence tools for better performance. Here is some business intelligence tool that is most popular among organizations. Some of the popular business intelligence tools are –

1. Dashboards
2. Visualizations
3. Reporting
4. Data Mining
5. ETL ( extract transfer load – tools that import data from one data store into another).
6. OLAP ( online analytical processing).

Out of all these tools, Dashboard and visualizations are the most popular. No doubt that the scope of BI tools is ever-increasing. Businesses can’t do well without using BI tools.