Understanding business intelligence: an intro

For many businesses, data analytics is a core way to track performance. But without solid knowledge of the effectiveness of a certain data set, it can be hard to know whether the performance gains are worth the cost. Business intelligence, or BI, is a concept that brings together data and analytical tools, helping to determine the success of any given project or service. But without data that is statistically reliable and trustworthy, it’s all just speculation. Here’s what you need to know about business intelligence data.

First, there are technical specifications for how data should be collected, managed and processed. You can then use a special reporting tool that’s designed for data analysis. Then you need to design the data presentation in such a way that gives you a clear understanding of different insights.

If you want the most recent, accurate data, BI tools are the best way to get it. To get such data, you need to do your own work — for instance, you can hire a data scientist or build your own — but in return, you’ll receive better access to more data, as well as access to your data that isn’t available through other methods.

Another important part of understanding business intelligence data is why it’s useful and useful enough to use. You have two choices: Simply knowing a certain statistic or finding a relationship that may provide an answer. One of the most useful statistical methods that gives insights into the market, for instance, is called regression. While it’s often difficult to make financial decisions based on that statistic, it is extremely useful in business research and marketing projects.

In the social media realm, the rise of app-subscribing services, like Netflix, make it much easier for organizations to monitor the performance of their own service. The audience, the content, and the number of subscriptions — all provides valuable data for analysis. Essentially, you can see a top story, such as a hit movie, coupled with a bottom story, such as that wonderful game on Minecraft. This helps you see your service in context and tells you what you need to do next. In both cases, what you’re looking for is the correlation between a data set and a response. In BI, that data is compared with other data sets to make the conclusion.

Looking at the big picture, letting the data tell the story of the whole company. In general, the more effective a BI tool is, the easier it is to share the results with your customers, employees and partners. You’ll also be able to further analyze the data you’ve collected to find correlations that may give some additional insights.