Wednesday, April 29, 2015

How Do We Define Business Intelligence?

By Mark Smith

BI process can effectively handle massive volume of data for corporate clients as well as other business owners. BI technologies are used for making effective business decisions. They diagnose the problems in the organization and plan strategies accordingly.

The main function of business intelligence is to convert the large volume of data into useful information that can be utilized in giving a company, stability and an advantage in the competitive market. BI system models can play a vital role in the growth of the business. They offer many benefits such as improving the current business plan, increasing the overall efficiency of the company and providing an edge over rival companies.

Business Intelligence systems help companies to recognize the market trends as well as address current and often inherent problems that exist within their structure. It offers a broad range of decision-making skills. It provides historical data as well as new data which can be used for potential business opportunities. It also provides a predictive perspective on the current data.

Business Intelligence offers the best solutions to the company when it combines the external as well as internal data. External data refers to the data that is acquired from the market, and internal data is the data that is obtained from the internal sources of the company.

This combination of external and internal data is known as 'Intelligence' in the Business Intelligence process. Unlike a singular set of information, this combination gives the full-fledged view of the company. The common functions of the BI are as follow:

Data Mining
Process Mining
Text Mining
Complex Event Processing
Business Performance Management
Predictive Analytics
Prescriptive Analytics
Online Analytical Processing
Reporting
Benchmarking

How It All Began?

Business Intelligence technology was developed from the Decision Support Systems (DSS). DSS was introduced in the 1960s and went through a continual development phase in the late 1980s. Many technologies such as Executive Information Systems, data warehouses and BI that were derived from DSS, came into the spotlight. Finally in 1989, Business Intelligence was adopted as an umbrella term for the concepts and methodologies that improve the business decision-making process by using support systems.

New Trends

BI technology has developed over the years. The new BI technology has embedded data visualization software. It now offers additional features such as building dashboards, displaying performance scorecards, designing infographics and charts, etc.

BI applications are sometimes bought separately from the vendors while some vendors include these applications in their service packages. With BI, business metrics has become a lot easier to grasp.

About the Author
Mark Smith
Author is a professional technology consultant in a MNC company. He loves to share his knowledge and experience via articles and blogs.(show bio)

No comments:

Post a Comment