The Business Intelligence Know-Hows of the Modern World

For longer than I can remember, the term “spreadsheets” has always brought a frenzy among many working in the field of data. Although the purpose of the excel sheet was invented to simplify data cleaning and overall management, the widening horizon of big data had left several people daunted. There had to be a way found that could help data experts analyze and decode every intricacy of the data, and eventually the market. That is when Business Intelligence came in as a boon.

?Broadly, the term combines business analytics, data mining,?process analysis, and data visualization to gain more actionable insights, helping organizations to make more data-driven decisions across various industries. The term business intelligence often refers to a range of tools that provide quick, easy-to-interpret access to insights.?

Now it would be wrong to limit the entire definition of business intelligence to spreadsheets, however, it was one of the biggest challenges BI solved. To that extent, let’s understand the contribution of BI in detail:

How it is used:

BI tools allow end-users to identify actionable information from raw data sets and the findings are presented as reports, dashboards, graphs, maps, etc.

In 1958, Hans Peter Luhn published the article “A Business Intelligence System” in the IBM Journal of Research and Development, which became the foundation for the current understanding of BI.

Over the past few years, organizations are fast adapting to ever-changing BI tools. From being accessible to only fortune 500 companies once upon a time, BI has become an indispensable part of many organizations. BI and data analytics technology are constantly evolving and there is no sign of slowing down.

Business intelligence serves to help executives, managers, and other operational heads make better business decisions based on data. Furthermore, it helps identify better business opportunities, cut costs, and detect inefficient business processes.

Enhancing Productivity:

Businesses that successfully implement business intelligence can provide better customer service, allowing salespeople to use their selling time more productively. Owners can eliminate bottlenecks, refine their business processes, automate their daily tasks, etc.

An Intelligent Decision-Making Process:

It is important that you have a firm grasp of your organizational data whether you are a business owner or a manager. BI helps you structure and analyze the information in your organization. BI aids businesses in making strategic decisions.

The past:

The first generation of BI software was largely managed by the IT department. The Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) paradigm combined data from multiple systems into a single database, for storage or analytics. The final report would be a static report. The entire process takes days to weeks depending on skilled staff. The face of BI changed after the introduction of big data in the 80s.

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What lies ahead:

Future BI trends are all part of a quickly evolving model that is essential to the progression of modern businesses. The many capabilities of BI tools are responsible for driving the growth of the BI market, which is expected to be worth $33.3 billion by 2025. BI software will become more user-friendly as the industry grows. This growth will also drive a more knowledgeable user base. In a few years, this technology will evolve into AI-powered chatbots. Native language processing will provide direct answers to users' BI inquiries. This concept of machine learning is another major trend expected to take off in the business intelligence software industry in the future. The future of business is in the cloud, and this is also the way big data is now moving. Nearly all BI elements, including data sources and models, analytics, data storage, and computing power, have already moved to the cloud. Businesses need a connected cloud strategy to ensure reduced risk and flexibility.

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Some of the current tools used by organizations are

Power BI: With this tool, you should realize that after some data input it will show the key factor of the data. It is easy to use and very effective to present data in a graphical and analytic way.

Tableau: Corporate analysis tool that is effective. Can visualize complex data to enable customers to make informed decisions. Simple to use, easy to set up.

Qlik Sense: Qlik sense is a very powerful and easy-to-use tool, it requires some training but once you have gained the required skills it becomes an amazing app that can ingest data, manipulate, and present information from beginning to end.

Sisense Fusion Analytics: Sisense is easier to learn even for newbies. It is easy to write SQL queries and create charts using this tool. The key features include easy-to-use functions, a simpler method to create dashboards, and quick access to key metrics. It also has monitoring and alerting in place.

Looker – (by Google): Looker is a one-stop solution for analyzing and exploring real-time analytics with ease.

What’s in store for us!

The existing business intelligence tools are very versatile and cater to organizations across various fields. With easy to access information on business performance and enabling organizations to make informed business decisions, it will be interesting to see what the future holds for us! There is still room for innovations in terms of data collected directly from the customers. With ever-evolving technologies and the prevalence of artificial intelligence, the future of business intelligence looks brighter than ever.