THE FAMOUS QUESTIONS ABOUT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

WHAT IS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE ?

BI(Business Intelligence) is a set of processes, architectures, and technologies that convert raw data into meaningful information that drives profitable business actions. It is a suite of software and services to transform data into actionable intelligence and knowledge.

BI has a direct impact on organization’s strategic, tactical and operational business decisions. BI supports fact-based decision making using historical data rather than assumptions and gut feeling.BI tools perform data analysis and create reports, summaries, dashboards, maps, graphs, and charts to provide users with detailed intelligence about the nature of the business.

BI technologies can handle large amounts of structured and sometimes unstructured data to help identify, develop, and otherwise create new strategic?business opportunities. They aim to allow for the easy interpretation of these?big data. Identifying new opportunities and implementing an effective strategy based on?insights?can provide?businesses?with a competitive market advantage and long-term stability.

WHY IS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE IMPORTANT ?

Business intelligence can help companies make better decisions by showing present and historical data within their business context. Analysts can leverage BI to provide performance and competitor benchmarks to make the organization run smoother and more efficiently. Analysts can also more easily spot market trends to increase sales or revenue. Used effectively, the right data can help with anything from compliance to hiring efforts.?

A few ways that business intelligence can help companies make smarter, data-driven decisions:

• Identify ways to increase profit
• Analyze customer behavior
• Compare data with competitors
• Track performance
• Optimize operations
• Predict success
• Spot market trends
• Discover issues or problems

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 the business’s activity. Data is processed and then stored in data warehouses. Once it’s stored, users can then access the data, starting the analysis process to answer business questions.

Business intelligence includes data analytics and business analytics, but uses them only as parts of the whole process. BI helps users draw conclusions from data analysis. Data scientists dig into the specifics of data, using advanced statistics and predictive analytics to discover patterns and forecast future patterns. Business intelligence takes those models and algorithms and breaks the results down into actionable language.

WHERE IS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE USED ?

Business intelligence can be applied to the following business purposes:

• Performance metrics?and?benchmarking?inform business leaders of progress towards business goals (business process management).
• Analytics?quantify processes for a business to arrive at optimal decisions, and to perform business knowledge discovery. Analytics may variously involve?data mining,?process mining,?statistical analysis,?predictive analytics,?predictive modeling,?business process modeling,?data lineage,?complex event processing, and?prescriptive analytics. For example within banking industry, academic research has explored potential for BI based analytics in credit evaluation, customer churn management for managerial adoption

• Business reporting?can use BI data to inform strategy. Business reporting may involve?dashboards,?data visualization,?executive information system, and/or?OLAP
• BI can facilitate?collaboration?both inside and outside the business by enabling?data sharing?and?electronic data interchange
• Knowledge management?is concerned with the creation, distribution, use, and management of business intelligence, and of business knowledge in general. Knowledge management leads to?learning management?and?regulatory compliance.

WHAT IS THE JOB ROLES AVAILABLE ?

Some common technical roles for business intelligence developers are:- (Click on the links to know more about these roles)

• Business analyst
• Data analyst
• Data engineer
• Data scientist
• Database administrator

WHERE CAN I FIND BI TOOLS SOFTWARE ?

Currently there are many companies that find BI tools in their software. A few mentioned below are the top competitors among them:- (Click on the links to reach to these websites.)

1. SAP business Objects
2. Tableau BI
3. Datapine BI
4. MicroStrategy
5. SAS BI
6. Yellowfin BI
7. Qliksense BI
8. Zoho Analytics
9. Sisense BI
10. Microsoft Power BI
11. Looker BI
12. Clear Analytics
13. Oracle BI (Netsuite)
14. Domo BI
15. IBM Cognos Analytics
16. Board BI
17. pentaho BI
18. TIBCO BI (Jaspersoft)
19. BIRT BI
20. Dundas BI
21. Inetsoft (Style intelligence)
22. Birst BI
23. Netlink Analytics( Lumenore)
24. Clicdata BI
25. Profitbase BI
26. Exago BI
27. Logility BI
28. Rapid insight BI
29. Alteryx BI
30. Longview BI
31. splunk BI
32. Oracle BI

WHEN SHOULD I INTRODUCE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE IN MY COMPANY ?

At the end of the day all organizations will benefit from business intelligence. However, below are some clear indicators that you should consider a business intelligence technology specifically for your business:

• Needing to integrate data from several business applications or data sources
• Needing to access relevant business data quickly and efficiently
• Having a lack of visibility into the company’s operations, events, news, finances, and other areas
• Having an increasing volume of users requiring and accessing information and more end-users requiring analytical capabilities
• Company growing rapidly or experiencing a recent or pending merger/acquisition
• Introducing new products
• Upgrading the IT environment.

If any or all of the above applies to your company, then you may want to consider putting Business Intelligence technology at the top of your agenda.

WHERE CAN I LEARN ABOUT BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE ?

There are exceptional training programs that you can choose to learn about business intelligence. Some among them are given below :-

1. Advanced Business Analytics Specialization

Offered by: University of Colorado Boulder on Coursera Duration: 5 Months Mode: Online

This specialization brings together academic professionals and experienced practitioners to share real-world data analytics skills you can use to grow your business, increase profits, and create maximum value for your shareholders. Through this course, learners gain practical skills in extracting and manipulating data using SQL code, executing statistical methods for descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analysis, and effectively interpreting and presenting analytic results.

2. IBM Certified Designer – IBM Cognos Analytics Author V11

Offered by: IBM Mode: Online

This course provides learners to build advanced reports, active reports and dashboards using relational data and uploaded files, as well as enhancing, customizing, and managing professional reports. For this certification, aspirants are recommended to have the described level of skills including experience using a modern web, basic knowledge of database concepts, SQL and Javascript, and they must know how to visually present data.

3. Graduate Certificate in Intelligence Analysis

Offered by: Charles Sturt University Duration: 18 Months Mode: Online

This course is part of an articulated program of study. Articulated programs allow students to build on their studies to achieve the right level of qualification for them. This certification program has Commonwealth supported places (CSP). This means the Australian Government pays part of learners’ fees. The course offers the convenience of online study, best practices, and future-proof career opportunities.

4. Getting Started with Power BI Desktop

Offered by: Coursera Project Network Duration: 2 Hours Mode: Online

This 2-hour long project-based course offers learners to learn the basics of using Power BI Desktop software by analyzing data on credit card defaults with Power BI Desktop. Power BI Desktop is a free business intelligence application from Microsoft that allows users to load, transform, and visualize data. They can create interactive reports and dashboards quite easily, and quickly. This course is designed for learners looking to get started with the Power BI Desktop software.

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5. SAS Visual Business Analytics Professional Certificate

Offered: SAS on Coursera Duration: 2 Months Mode: Online

This professional certification lets learners explore data using SAS Visual Analytics. They will learn how to prepare data using SAS Data Studio, how to create interactive reports using SAS Visual Analytics, and will be able to describe the data structure needed for network analysis, path analysis, and text analytics. SAS Visual Analytics is a useful skill in a diverse career, including business analyst, researcher, statistician, or data scientist. Through this, a user will learn to access and manipulate data, assess data with a variety of interactive reports and graphics, and design and share dashboards to visualize their data.

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6. Tableau Desktop Certified Professional

Offered by: Udemy Duration: 6 Hours Mode: Online

This course will help learners to learn how to data manipulation, understanding data, gathering reports from databases and consolidating data. They will be having a clear idea about Dashboards in Tableau, and how to make great presentations using them. Learners can also manipulate their existing data using calculated fields, parameters and various other options. This course is created as per the Tableau desktop III online certification exam.

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7. Business Intelligence Concepts, Tools, and Applications

Offered by: University of Colorado Duration: 22 Hours Mode: Online

The course offers an overview of how business intelligence technologies can support decision making across any number of business sectors. In this course, learners will gain the knowledge and skills for using data warehouses for business intelligence purposes and for working as a BI developer. They will have the opportunity to work with large data sets in a data warehouse environment and learn the use of MicroStrategy’s Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) and Visualization capabilities to create visualizations and dashboards.

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8. Excel to MySQL: Analytic Techniques for Business Specialization

Offered by: Duke University Duration: 7 Months Mode: Online

This specialization provides learners to frame business challenges as data questions. Learners will use powerful tools and methods such as Excel, Tableau, and MySQL to evaluate data, create forecasts and models, design visualizations, and communicate insights. In the final Capstone Project, they will apply their skills to explore and justify improvements to a real-world business process.

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9. Business Intelligence Certificate

Offered by:?Rockhurst University Duration: 15 Months Mode: Online

The university’s Certificate in Analytics and Insights is a 12-credit program that helps students understand, create, monitor, and evaluate analytics. Students will gain experience from experienced faculty. They will learn from doctoral-level, full-time professors from the AACSB-accredited Helzberg School of Management, along with practicing experts.

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10. Professional Program Certificate in Six Sigma and Lean: Quantitative Tools for Productivity and Quality (Technische Universit?t München)

Offered by: edX Duration: 18-24 Weeks Mode: Online

In this course, learners will learn the fundamentals of the Six Sigma methodology and Lean Manufacturing. They will learn the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control) process improvement cycle and examine how the principles of Lean production improve quality and productivity and enable organizational transformation. The series of courses is provided in collaboration with the TUM School of Management Executive Education Center and the Chair of Production and Supply Chain Management.

?11.Linkedin learning

Linked-in Learning also provides many free courses for beginners who want to get an idea about the BI and its applications. If you are a premium member the you can avail all of the courses along with their certifications. Most of the courses are around a month to 4 months or so.

Author's Note :-

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-Pranay Bhonagiri.