July 12, 2018
What is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence can be defined as a pre determined set of tools and techniques for the transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes. This information can be further used to enable more effective, strategic, tactical and operational insights that might ease the process of decision making options. A Business Intelligence system ideally, provides an organization’s employees, partners, and suppliers’ easy access to all such information they need to do their jobseffectively and efficiently.
Hans Peter Luhn, IBM researcher in the 20th century concluded that the ability to understand the inter-relationships of presented facts in a way such that it guides a designated action towards a desired goal” as Business Intelligence.
The Need of Business Intelligence
Business intelligence is increasingly becoming a strategic differentiator for today’s leading organizations. Itis more of a process than a project. Generally, all stakeholders do not understand it from the beginning. It takes at least a couple of months to get an understanding of the same.
Business Intelligence helps an organization in a number of ways.
- Provides business the ability to track, understand, and manage information within an organization.
- Helps in targeting expenses while protecting the core business.
- Gives executives, mid-level or line managers, and employees the information they need to drive operational efficiencies
- Easy analysis of expenses across multiple information systems
- Key factor in improving top line revenue growth
- Helps in driving towards higher service levels
- Increases revenue by bringing the latest trends in customer behavior, determining profitable customer segments and identifying cross-selling opportunities
Business Intelligence Implementation Strategies
When a BI project is implemented, it involves considerable amount of investments both in terms of time and money. Therefore, it is advised to ensure flawless execution. Error free implementation of a business intelligence project results in innumerable advantages and benefits the company in the long run. Here are 3 such top implementation strategies for business implementation.
Setting the Right Expectations: It is a common saying that “Expectation Hurts”. This is because human wants and needs are just endless. At the same time, right expectations sometimes prove fruitful if the implementation strategy is followed accordingly. It will be unrealistic to expect a business to do wonders with Business Intelligence implemented within a short span of time. Instead, any BI implementation should focus on some key business parameters like increasing customer base, expanding existing markets, and growing revenues apart from its relevance, accuracy, consistency, and timeliness.
Clean Data: Data is the most critical raw material to make any Business Intelligence solution perform smoothly. General Manager of Data and Analytics Solutions for North America at Mindtree, Chandra Siv is of the opinion that addressing data quality is a must. This is becausethe confidence level and trust in the data used for decision making is a critical success factor.” At times, cleaning of data becomes the biggest issue during BI implementation.
Prioritize your Goals: Like every individual being, business also favors success and growth. And, in order to achieve the same, one needs to set a target. Setting a goal makes your job even easier. Prepare a SWOT Analysis of your business and work towards it. This can be followed even during Business Intelligence implementation.
Say for example, someBI platforms are free, but take longer period for integration while others are subscription-based, and can be installed in a week. So, which option would your business prefer?
Generally, it is always advised whether a business is small or big, to start small. Wherein you need to focus a few goals in the beginning and then add more to your list. This is because, if you are starting with limited fund and your venture fails to attain the goals that had been set, the business calculates limited risk.
With Easy Reports Business Intelligence tool, you can now get customized and affordable reporting solutions. It provides the most advanced features, inclusive of all the latest technical updates.