Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Management
As organizations increasingly use technology across their operational and business processes, they also gather incremental amounts of data. This data can provide meaningful insights into the historical and future business performance of the organization.
Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Management software help organizations analyze this data and present actionable information to help business managers make better decisions.
What is BI?
Business Intelligence and Data Management encompass the technology solutions and practices that are used by enterprises for data gathering, interpretation and usage of business information.
BI is extremely relevant in today’s world because it can help organizations set and achieve strategic goals. BI software systems have standardized structures that help in indexing and archiving data, followed by which they parse these datasets into meaningful reports. Further, an added layer of visualization helps to identify and project useful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and display business parameters.
The disruptive impact of BI comes from its ability to manipulate data on a real-time basis and on the scale. The overall aim of BI and Data Management systems is to help in adding efficiency to the production cycle, thus resulting in reduced costs and processing time.
What does BI do?
More and more businesses are identifying the benefits of BI solutions today both in terms of developing a business growth as well as gaining a competitive edge.
- Drive Business growth: Robust BI systems can help you identify the right set of customers and your target market. Looking at data models in a multidimensional manner, you can also further identify potential areas of growth.
- Provide real-time data insights: Data is generated dynamically across the organization. BI systems are able to sort this data immediately and provide business owners with information on a real-time basis. Critical events can be identified immediately and handled effectively.
- Devise company strategy: The biggest value-add from BI systems for the business manager is the dashboard. Advanced visualization technologies empower business owners to slice and dice data as per their will. Scorecards can be generated as per the company’s needs. Predictive analytics and forecasting methodologies can help in projecting future outcomes.
Functional Areas of BI
- Data Collection: BI systems collect and sort big data into structured data sets, making it ready for analysis.
- Data Lineage Tracking: This process helps to create a timeline for data across its lifetime.
- Business Analytics: Analytics or Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) is the core of all BI solutions.
- Visualization and Dashboards: This feature converts data into actionable business insights and metrics. Business managers can navigate through data and data sets in a meaningful manner with tools such as regression, time-series zooming and conditional formatting.
Trends and Industry Needs
- Evolution of dashboards: Dashboards are now increasingly composed of a collection of blocks and widgets, with the aim of providing more control to the end user. This would provide business managers the freedom to explore and analyze data at their ease and on the go. Further, the focus is on creating actionable analytics, metrics and indices, which would empower business managers to make intelligent decisions.
- Machine Learning: Artificial Intelligence and deep learning technologies are the future of BI solutions and predictive analytics. This technology is already integrated with most BI systems and the focus is now on ensuring that machine learning models are trustworthy and accurate.
- Internet of Things (IoT): Integration with sensors and equipment across industries can bring new processes under the purview of BI and Data Management processes, implying that new areas and industries can benefit from them.
- Privacy and data handling concerns: Since data is the new currency, we can definitely expect new laws and stricter regulations governing the access and use of data.
Top BI software vendors
- SAP Business Intelligence: A popular BI and Data Management platform that is easily integrated across ERP and other solutions, SAP Business Intelligence provides advanced analytics and data visualization and is powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI).
- Sisense: Known for being user-friendly, this Sisense business intelligence tool provides users the flexibility to bring in data from a number from sources, and manage this data as well as analyze it. A low-code tool, Sisense empowers the end users as well as processes data quickly due to its in-chip technology.
- SAS Business Intelligence: This intelligent system provides advanced integration with existing configurations as well as superior predictive analytics