Business intelligence (BI) is includes everything from data mining, business analytics, data visualization, data tools and infrastructure, and best practices that help companies to make decisions based on existing data. Practically, you can say you’ve got modern business intelligence when you can have a complete view of your organization’s data and exploit that data to make changes, remove inefficiencies, and rapidly adapt to market or supply variations. With Tableau Consulting, you can understand the importance of business intelligence and how the top BI tool can help you thrive in the modern competitive market.
It’s significant to note that this is a very contemporary definition of BI, and it has had a restrained history like a buzzword. Traditional Business Intelligence originally evolved in the 1960s as a system of sharing data across organizations. It further grew in the 1980s together with computer models for decision-making and transforming data into insights before becoming specific products by the BI teams with IT-dependent service solutions. Modern BI tools prioritize flexible self-service analysis, trusted data-governance platforms, authorized business users, and agility to view insights.
Examples of Business Intelligence
The Explain Data feature in Tableau helps rapidly identify competent explanations of outliers and trends in data. Business intelligence is much more than a single process – it is an umbrella that covers all the processes and methods, from collecting, storing, and analyzing data from business functions or activities to manage performance. All of these operations work collectively to produce a complete view of a business to help people in making superior, actionable decisions.
In the last few years, business intelligence has developed to comprise more processes and activities to make performance better. These processes comprise:
Data mining: Making use of databases, statistics, and machine learning to discover trends in large datasets
Reporting: Sharing reports of data analysis to stakeholders so they can depict conclusions and build decisions
Performance metrics and benchmarking: Comparing current performance data to historical data to track performance against goals usually using tailored dashboards
Descriptive analytics: Utilizing preliminary data analysis to determine what happened.
Querying: Asking the data related questions to which BI finds out the answers from the available datasets
Statistical analysis: Driving the results from descriptive analytics and extra discovering the data using statistics like how this trend occurred and why
Data visualization: Transforming data analysis into visual illustrations like charts, graphs, and histograms to more effortlessly understand data
Visual analysis: Discovering data through visual storytelling to converse insights on the board and continue to be in the flow of analysis
Data preparation: Collecting multiple data sources, recognizing the dimensions and measurements, making it ready for data analysis
Importance of Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence can help businesses make advanced decisions by presenting current and historical data within their business state of affairs. Analysts can empower BI to deliver performance and competitor benchmarks to make the organization operate more smoothly and efficiently. Analysts can also easily identify more market trends to boost sales or revenue. If the data is used effectively, it can help with everything from compliance to employing staff.
A few means that business intelligence can help organizations to make smarter, data-based decisions:
- Find out ways to boost profit
- Evaluate customer behavior
- Evaluate data with competitors
- Track performance
- Manage operations
- Forecast success
- Mark market trends
- Find out issues or problems
How Does Business Intelligence Work?
Businesses and organizations have queries and goals. To find out the answers to these questions and manage performance against these goals, they collect the essential data, analyze it, and conclude which actions should be taken to attain their goals.
Technically, raw data is collected from all activities of the business. Then the data is processed and stored in data warehouses. Once it’s saved, then the users can access the data, starting the analysis process for responding to business questions.
How BI, Data Analytics, and Business Analytics Work Collectively?
Business intelligence involves data analytics and business analytics but makes their use only as a different part of the overall process. BI helps users conclude from data analysis. Data scientists mine into the particulars of data by using advanced statistics and predictive analytics to identify patterns and predict future patterns. Data analytics helps you to get answers for why did this happen and what can occur next? Business intelligence makes use of such models and algorithms and shatters the results down into actionable words.
According to the IT Glossary of Gartner, business analytics involves data mining, statistics, predictive analytics, and applied analytics. Briefly, organizations carry out business analytics as part of their superior business intelligence strategy. BI is intended to answer exact queries and deliver quick analysis for decisions or planning. However, organizations can use analytical operations to improve follow-up questions and iteration.
Business analytics cannot be a linear process because finding answers to one question will probably lead to follow-up questions and iteration. Otherwise, you can consider the process as a series of data access, discovery, exploration, and information sharing. It is known as the cycle of analytics, a modern phrase explaining how businesses leverage analytics to respond to varying questions and expectations.
Difference Between Traditional BI and Modern BI
Previously, business intelligence solutions were designed based on a traditional business intelligence model. It was a top-down approach where business intelligence was determined by the IT organization, and the majority of analytics questions were answered via static reports. It meant that if somebody had a follow-up question about the report they got, their request would depart to the base of the reporting queue, and they needed to start the process once more.
This process led to slow, annoying reporting cycles, and users weren’t able to empower current data to make decisions. Traditional business intelligence is still a general method used for ordinary reporting and answering fixed queries.
On the other hand, modern business intelligence is interactive and accessible. While IT departments are still a vital part of managing access to data, various levels of users can modify dashboards and generate reports on short notice. With suitable software, users are enabled to visualize data and get answers to their own questions.
How Some Major Industries Use Business Intelligence?
A lot of different industries have implemented Business Intelligence more than before, including healthcare, information technology, and education. All companies can use data to change processes.
Financial firms use business intelligence to take a complete view of all current to realize performance metrics and spot areas of opportunity. Access a centralized business intelligence tool that allows you to take all of their branch data together into one view.
Business Intelligence lets branch managers recognize clients that may vary the number of investment needs. And management can track if a performance within the region is above or below average and check out the branches that are responsible for that region’s performance. It leads to more prospects for optimization, together with better customer service for clients.
How to Choose a Business Intelligence Tool?
A lot of self-service business intelligence tools and platforms align the analytics process. It makes it easier for users to view and understand their data without the technical knowledge of mining into the data themselves. There are numerous BI platforms existing for ad hoc reporting, data visualization, and building customized dashboards for several levels of users.
Here are some recommendations for analyzing modern BI platforms so you can select the right one for your company. One of the more general approaches to provide business intelligence is through data visualizations.
Benefits of Visual Analytics and Data Visualization
As you’re aware, data visualization is the most common way to deliver business intelligence. Humans are visual beings and vary in tune with different patterns or dissimilarities in colors. Data visualizations illustrate data in a way that is more handy and comprehensible.
Visualizations accumulated into dashboards can rapidly tell a story and emphasize on trends or patterns that may not be exposed easily when manually evaluating the raw data. This accessibility also allows additional conversations around the data, leading to wider business impact.
Leveraging Benefits of Business Intelligence with Tableau
The processes included in business intelligence help you manage your data so it can be simply accessed and analyzed. Decision-makers can then mine deeply and find the required information rapidly, allowing them to make well-versed decisions. But better decision making is just one advantage of business intelligence. Let’s take an overview of the most practical benefits of BI and how organizations are utilizing this technology to attain their goals.
Quicker Analysis, Intuitive Dashboards
BI tools are intended to do long-lasting processing of data in the cloud or on the physical servers of your company. BI tools draw in data from several sources into a data warehouse and then examine the data based on the user queries, drag-and-drop reports, and dashboards.
The benefit of BI dashboards is to make data analysis easier and actionable, enabling non-technical staff to tell stories with data without any need to learn to code.
Improved Organizational Efficiency
BI provides leaders the facility to access data and obtain a holistic view of their processes, and the capacity to benchmark results against the superior organization. By having a holistic vision of the organization, leaders can find out parts of opportunity.
When companies spend less time on data analysis and collecting reports, BI provides them extra time to use data to modify new programs and products for their business.
Data-Driven Business Decisions
Having correct data and quicker reporting functionality helps in better business decision-making. Organizations can use customized mobile dashboards for their sales department so they can see real-time data and predict sales before attending any meeting with potential clients. They can confidently talk about the need of clients as well as of prospects and understand that the data is up-to-date. So the business leaders don’t have to wait longer for reports and tackle the risk of data that may be expired.
Better Customer Experience
Business intelligence can directly influence customer experience and satisfaction. With Tableau, companies can deploy BI systems across various departments, building more than thousands of dashboards for employees. These dashboards withdraw data from different processes and text data from customer support interactions. Using such data, companies can discover opportunities to progress customer service and decrease support calls by 43 percent.
Enhanced Employee Satisfaction
Now, IT teams and analysts spend less time answering to business user queries. Departments that didn’t have access to their own data without consulting analysts or IT can now directly perform data analytics with minute training. BI is intended to be scalable, delivering data solutions to the people who need it and for employees who require data.
Trusted and Governed Data
BI systems enhance data management and analysis. In traditional data analytics, data from various departments are siloed, and users have to access multiple databases to answer their reporting queries. Now, modern BI platforms can unite all of these in-house databases with external data sources like customer data, social data, and even historical climate data into a single data warehouse. Departments throughout the organization can access the same data at a single time.
Increased Competitive Advantage
Businesses can stay more competitive when they understand the market and their performance within the marketplace. They can analyze the data to find out the best possible time to enter and exit the market and place themselves tactically. BI lets businesses to sustain with changes in the industry, examine seasonal changes in the market, and predict customer needs.
Adopt Tableau’s Self-Service Business Intelligence (SSBI)!
Today, many organizations are shifting towards a modern business intelligence model, distinguished as a self-service approach to data. IT supervises the data (security, accuracy, and access), enabling users to act together with their data straight away. Modern analytics platforms like Tableau help organizations tackle every step in the cycle of analytics- data preparation in Tableau Prep, analysis and discovery in Tableau Desktop, and data sharing and governance in Tableau Server or Tableau Online. It means that Tableau Consulting can help you govern data access while empowering more people visually to discover their data and share the insights.
