📊 Business Intelligence
It has become increasingly important for businesses to have a clear view of all their data to stay competitive. This is where business intelligence (BI) tools play a prominent role. After all, nearly 50% of all businesses already use BI tools, and projections show continued growth in the years ahead. BI is a broad term that encompasses data mining, process analysis, performance benchmarking, and descriptive analytics. BI parses all the data generated by a business and presents easy-to-digest reports, performance measures, and trends that inform management decisions.
BI has always had a strangled history as a buzzword. It is continually evolving to keep pace with business needs and technology. Each year, current trends are identified to keep users up-to-date with innovations. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning continue to grow, which makes businesses integrate the insights from AI into a broader BI strategy. As companies strive to be more data-driven, efforts to share data and collaborate will increase.
Data visualisation will be even more essential to work together across teams and departments. BI offers capabilities for near real-time sales tracking, allowing users to discover insights into customer behaviour, forecast profits, and more. Executives, managers and workers can now make informed business decisions thanks to BI. The overall goal of BI initiatives is to drive better business decisions that enable organisations to increase revenue, improve operational efficiency and gain competitive advantages over business rivals.
The need for BI was derived from the concept that managers with inaccurate or incomplete information tend, on average, to make worse decisions than if they have better information. Creators of financial models recognise this as "garbage in, garbage out". BI attempts to solve this problem by analysing current data that is ideally presented on a dashboard of quick metrics designed to support better decisions.
Many companies adopt BI to support functions as diverse as hiring, compliance, production, and marketing. BI is a core business value. Some benefits, together with many others, that companies can experience after adopting BI into their business models include accurate reporting and analysis, and reliable data quality. Simply put, the ability to make better business decisions is the ultimate way to satisfy employees, reduce costs and increase revenues.