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“Business Intelligence”, two simple words that have changed the way business is done all around the world. Trying to define these two words, using one simple definition, does not serves the purpose. Overtime, great people and organizations have come forward and tried to explain the very essence of it. Let us have a look upon them –

1. GARTNER– Business intelligence (BI)is an umbrella term that includes the applications, infrastructure and tools, and best practices that enable access to and analysis of information to improve and optimize decisions and performance.
2. TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute) – Business intelligence(BI) unites data, technology, analytic, and human knowledge to optimize business decisions and ultimately drive an enterprise’s success. BI programs usually combine an enterprise data warehouse and a BI platform or tool set to transform data into usable, actionable business information.
3. SearchDataManagement.target.com -Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven process for analyzing data and presenting actionable information to help corporate executives, business managers and other end users make more informed business decisions. BI encompasses a variety of tools, applications and methodologies that enable organizations to collect data from internal systems and external sources, prepare it for analysis, develop and run queries against the data, and create reports, dashboards and data visualizations to make the analytical results available to corporate decision makers as well as operational workers.

In simple terms- Business Intelligence resides in itself anything and everything that is useful for understanding data, analyzing it and using it to make better decisions. So, it is rather a term used for the processes/steps involved in converting data to make better business decisions. These steps involve –

1. Collecting data
2. Cleaning data
3. Storing data
4. Analyzing data
5. Reporting

Once you have understood what Business Intelligence is, it becomes quite easy to understand why it is important!

WHY IS BI IMPORTANT?

With the coming of internet and database, organizations started having lots of data (in millions of GBs and TBs) and the best part is that this data is very useful. However, completely depending on the relational databases to fetch the results, led to failure of some companies. This was because, RDBMS has its own limitations on the kind of results that it can provide. With growing business need, it became very urgent for the business around the world to be able to use the data, to understand it, to predict and take further actions. Business Intelligence helps in this. It allows the business to analyze lots of data, monitor business trends and adapt quickly to changing business scenario. Let us have a look at some of the reasons why importance of business intelligence has grown exponentially –

1. Customer Insights– A good BI helps the business to understand what the customer is buying or what are his/her preferences. Once you know the trend, you can use the information to develop products that match customer trends and thereby improve your profits.

2. More visibility– Business Intelligence allows you to have a clear vision of the various aspects of your organization. It allows you to understand easily and clearly, what are strong areas and where you need to work on. The best part, this happens to the right precision and takes into consideration the smallest of the details.

3. Increased Productivity – Using traditional techniques, the employees need to gather, analyze and make reports. But, using BI, the entire process of analyzing and reporting becomes automated, hence allowing employees to focus more on important tasks.

4. Availability of Better Information– With changing times, time has become an altogether important factor. Competition has risen and the winner is one, who does thing most accurately and in the minimum time. Although, it is possible for you to have some extent of insight about the data using traditional techniques, BI allows you to have a more accurate and relevant data, faster.

5. Better Decision Making– A great decision comes out only when the decision maker has enough and accurate information. With BI, the SMEs have accurate and proper access to the past, present of nearly all the operations giving them a proper insight to make better decisions for the future.

6. Improved Return On Investment – With better strategic awareness, faster reporting and lower overheads of accessing better quality data and information, BI in turns positively influence a company’s ROI.

The world has evolved one more time, and this time it has become faster. With emerging businesses every day, it is evident, that very soon, Business Intelligence will be at the heart of every successful Business.
Happy Learning 🙂