Confused about BI ? Here is Business Intelligence Explained!

“Business Intelligence”, “Dashboards”, “Actionable Data” you often hear these fancy terms getting thrown around all the time, but what do they clearly mean?

Through this article, we’re going to be answering questions like What is BI? Who uses it? Why? and tackle different avantages and challenges of Enterprise BI.

What exactly is Business Intelligence ?

“Business intelligence” or “BI” delivers relevant and reliable information, to the right people at the right time. to make better decisions faster.

It is a term that refers to the practices and disciplines of collection of data coming from multiple sources under different forms, storage and analysis then presentation of that data under form of information that will decision making process. 

This is usually enabled and facilitated by a Hardware infrastructure and multiple software tools

Business intelligence allows companies to shift from gut feeling or from having the most influential, powerful or persuasive person driving the decisions, to having the person with the most facts around that decision. 

It keeps the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of the company always accessible by decision makers in a way that is easily understandable and actionable(ie. can be acted upon). This can be under forms of Reports, Graphs, Presentations and most importantly live dashboards or even maps.

Why Business Intelligence ?

BI can help companies make better decisions by providing historical past data, showing the current state and predicting future outcomes based on the information available. It gives a clear overview on everything that’s happening in the company and can even provide notifications and alerts.

Here are some of the ways you can use Business Intelligence to improve a company:

• Prediction of successful actions
• Tracking market share
• Better targeting of campaigns
• Reveal problems and challenges
• Understanding Customers, Employees, Partners, Suppliers, Distributors and Competitors. Basically to understand all parties involved in the Business.
• To find Growth Markets/Products/Services opportunities
• Segmentation of clients
• Anticipate risks and take action towards them
• Having only one single source of truth in the company

But in general, BI allows you to know the direction the business is at and where it’s heading, you wouldn’t want to drive a car blindfolded based on gut feeling and instinct, so why drive your business that way?

BI usage examples

Sales – product/service/program revenues, compare across verticals/horizontals, commissions for sales manager…

Marketing (Marketing Managers) – Campaigns Management, Subscription Management…

HR – Employee cost, Utilization ratio, legal and regulatory compliance, Job application to selection/rejection ratio, forecast growth in employee count…

Finance- Budgeting, Accruals, cost center reporting and planning, profit and loss reports, Billing Reports…

Product/Service Management Teams – Monitor product/Service performance, compare across products/Services/categories…

Account Management Teams – Monitor account performance, Revenue tracking, Regulatory reporting…

Operations – Ticket backlog, SLA’s , Call centre stats, Technical performance indicators…

Education – Supervise student’s learning and development, assess their educational needs and find weak points in the programs.

Non profit – Overview the organisation’s member journey, ensure they are getting the right development necessary, and that there’s a pipeline in the organisation hierarchy.

In each of these functions the users are usually Managers and Heads

Higher Management – Overview reports/Dashboards

Who uses Business intelligence ?

There are different kinds of users of BI in a company each using a BI system in a different way, usually with the help of a technician to translate their business questions into queries that enter the system and receive an answer.

CEO or CXO

Uses business intelligence to have an eagle’s-eye view on all areas of the company to optimize it and to improve efficiency

The IT user

Manages and maintains an infrastructure and a robust data flow the companies operational systems (Stock / Commercial / Financial / CRM / ERP … ) to the data management systems (BI)

The Statistician & Analyst

Uses the BI system to slice and dice data and dive deep into it to find roots of issues of have actionable insights on a specific issue

The Business User

Any Manager, stakeholder or decision maker in the company who will need Information to base important decisions on, he can be a marketing director, a team leader, or even a bottom-level employee. BI systems can give different views and accesses to different people in the company to ensure security and proper confidentiality of data.

Self Service BI

Today, more and more companies are converting into what’s called Self-Service Business Intelligence (SSBI), which are systems that once built, will allow anyone in the company without having a solid background in statistics nor analytics or IT to be able to explore and drill down into the data.

One of the most common uses of SSBI, are platforms containing live dashboards and reports that are interactive and adaptive to the business user’s needs.

Usually the SSBI systems are pretty intuitive and easy to use, but sometimes due to complexity of the business process a certain amount of explanation and training for this is required, but the return on this investment is huge, and most of the time if the advantages of BI are clear, employees are eager to get on board for this.

Challenges of Business Intelligence

Nowadays, companies still find difficulties in implementing BI into their workflow, these difficulties include:

• Cost: Implementing a BI system can be pretty costly depending on the complexity of the infrastructure of the company which sometimes also makes BI not affordable by small to medium companies.
• Complexity: The need for high end BI technicians to implement elaborate BI systems, and the extremely lengthy process can sometimes make that BI system not show value until a very long temp
• Bad Infrastructure: Some companies that are not using data to make decisions in the first place can have a pretty challenging and messy infrastructure, making the BI process difficult and sometimes needing a data management project beforehand.

Agile business intelligence

The term “Agile” refers usually to a software development methodology that was coined in 2011 adhering to the following principles:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

In practice, Agile is an iterative approach that delivers the product under different increments prioritising the most important use cases first.

Many BI firms, such as Dash, have successfully adopted this methodology to deal with the challenges that come with BI and overcome them or find a way around them, using this methodology we can:

• Provide customers with operational versions in record time
• Offer flexible and adaptable solutions to the context of constant economic change thanks to the iterative processes developed
• Reduce the costs of implementing a BI project by fragmenting it with numerous iterations. Adopting BI is no longer a heavy and expensive project, and becomes accessible to smaller accounts.

Agile finds change not as an obstacle or problem, but instead as a powerful competitive advantage, especially in such unstable, unpredictable market, having flexible and adaptive BI has become a necessity, and companies who do adopt it get to reap the benefits!