Business intelligence (BI) combines business analytics, data mining, and data visualization to help you make data-driven decisions. With BI, you gain a comprehensive view of your organization by gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data from internal and external sources. You can use that data to eliminate inefficiencies, improve business processes, and quickly adapt to market changes.
BI ensures you have the information you need by:
- Collecting current information from throughout your business
- Presenting the data in tables and graphs that are easy to understand
- Delivering insights quickly and efficiently to your entire team
With business intelligence, your entire organization has the knowledge required to make smarter decisions faster.
Business Intelligence Benefits
Data is the most valuable resource for sustaining and growing businesses today. The right BI tool enables you to acquire, integrate, distribute, review, and respond to new data more effectively and efficiently.
Used effectively, the right data can help you:
- Gain visibility into cash flow, gross margins, and operating expenses
- Track supplier performance
- Improve forecasting
- Uncover new revenue opportunities
- Identify and reduce inefficiencies across the entire organization
- Eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse
- Increase ROI
You make better decisions by analyzing present and historical information quickly. You always know the true state of your business.
Essential BI Characteristics
Ease of use. Perhaps the most important feature of a BI tool is ease of use. No matter how great the reports are, no one will use them if creating them is too difficult. You need to gain insights without complicated instructions or days of training. You need to create the reports you need quickly and easily.
Real-time information. Real-time data isn’t as valuable without real-time insights. When you have new data, you need to quickly turn that data into insights so you can solve problems or identify opportunities as soon as possible.
Customization. Your business is unique. You need the ability to create custom dashboards and reports to address your unique needs. Your business is evolving, so the reports you need may change over time. It’s also helpful to create custom navigation for your team so they can find content quickly and understand the relationships between different reports and dashboards.
Role-based security. You want a BI tool to benefit your entire team or organization, but you don’t want every person to have access to all your reports. Some data is not relevant to the entire organization. You need to be able to create access filters to ensure team members only see the data relevant to them.
Artificial intelligence (AI). If you are working with a lot of data, you need AI to analyze the data efficiently and effectively. AI processes large amounts of data faster and more accurately than human beings, saving time and providing better insights.
Business intelligence turns your data into actionable intelligence. It enables you to run custom reports in real time, assess the state of your business, and create a plan to take advantage of new opportunities or swiftly address challenges. BI is an essential tool in 2022.