Business Intelligence

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What is business intelligence?

Business intelligence combines business analytics, data mining, data visualization, data tools and infrastructure, and best practices to help organizations make more data-driven decisions. In practice, you know you’ve got modern business intelligence when you have a comprehensive view of your organization’s data and use that data to drive change, eliminate inefficiencies, and quickly adapt to market or supply changes. Modern BI solutions prioritize flexible self-service analysis, governed data on trusted platforms, empowered business users, and speed to insight.

How business intelligence works

Businesses and organizations have questions and goals. To answer these questions and track performance against these goals, they gather the necessary data, analyze it, and determine which actions to take to reach their goals.

On the technical side, raw data is collected from business systems. Data is processed and then stored in data warehouses, the cloud, applications, and files. Once it’s stored, users can access the data.

Why business intelligence is important

Business intelligence gives organizations the ability to ask questions in plain language and get answers they can understand. Instead of using best guesses, they can base decisions on what their business data is telling them — whether it relates to production, supply chain, customers or market trends.

Why are sales dropping in this region? Where do we have excess inventory? What are customers saying on social media? BI helps answer these critical questions.