Business Intelligence (or BI) is a set of architectures, processes, and technologies that transform raw data into relevant information that aids businesses to make profitable actions.
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It is a collection of services and software that transforms data into knowledge and intelligence that businesses can then put into action. Because of this, business intelligence AI has a significant influence on a business’ operational, tactical, and strategic business decisions.
BI supports decision-making by relying on facts and using previous data rather than making decisions based on assumptions. BI tools analyze data, and create charts, dashboards, reports, graphs, maps, and summaries to give users detailed information about their business.
Why Do We Need Business Intelligence AI?
There are a few reasons why business intelligence AI is so useful for organizations.
- They can create Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) based on historical data.
- They can identify and create benchmarks for a variety of processes.
- BI systems let organizations identify market trends and identify potential business issues.
- BI also assists data visualization that improves the data quality and therefore the decision-making quality.
Main Types Of Business Intelligence Tools And Software
There are a wide range of BI software and tools out there, and below you’ll find some of the most popular kinds of BI solutions.
- Data mining tools: These tools ‘mine’ massive amounts of data for patterns with the help of AI, statistics, and machine learning.
- Data visualization software: These translate sets of data into visually pleasing, easily digestible representations so you can gain insights quickly.
- OLAP (Online Analytical Processing): These tools let you analyze sets of data from a wide range of angles and business perspectives.
- Reporting software: This is used to report, arrange, sift through, and display data.
- Spreadsheets: Yes, even spreadsheets like Google Docs and Microsoft Excel are BI tools and are in fact one of the most popular BI tools!
Who Uses Business Intelligence The Most?
Let’s take a look at who has the most use out of business intelligence systems:
- Data analysts: Data analysts are statisticians whose job it is to dig deep into data. Business intelligence systems help them get new insights into data to develop new and exciting business strategies.
- IT users: IT users play a huge role in maintaining the infrastructure of business intelligence systems.
- Senior management: Senior management such as CEOs can boost profits by enhancing the efficiency of their business with the help of business intelligence systems.
- Business users: Business intelligence users are found across most areas of the business, but there are two main types of business users. These are the casual business intelligence user and the power user. The power user is able to work with complicated sets of data, while the casual user will make use of dashboards to analyze predefined datasets.
What Are The Main Trends Of Business Intelligence?
- Artificial Intelligence: AI and machine learning are now able to tackle complicated tasks that once relied on human intelligence. The developments of AI and machine learning are now being used to create real-time dashboard reporting and data analysis.
- Cloud analytics: BI applications are closer than ever to being provided in the cloud, and it’s likely that more businesses will be taking advantage of this technology.
- Collaborative business intelligence: Business intelligence software that is integrated with collaboration tools like social media and other new technologies will improve how teams share their data and therefore improve collaborative decision-making.
- Embedded business intelligence: This allows BI software and some of their features to be integrated into other business applications for extending and improving its reporting functionality.
What Are The Benefits Of Business Intelligence AI?
- Improves productivity: A BI system makes it possible for organizations to create reports with just one click, which saves a lot of time and resources. It also improves the productivity of employees.
- Enhances visibility: Business intelligence also can be beneficial in improving the visibility of business processes and make it easier to identify areas that are lacking.
- Improves accountability: BI systems makes organizations more accountable, as somebody needs to be assigned accountability for the performance of the organization against its targets.
- It provides a bird’s eye view of your business: BI systems help businesses make decisions by giving them a bird’s eye view via BI features like scorecards and dashboards.
- Streamlines business processes: BI makes business processes far less complicated. It also makes analytics automated by providing benchmarking, computer modeling, and predictive analysis and other methodologies.
- It makes analytics easier: BI software has adjusted the usage of analytics so even users who are not analysts can quickly gather and process data. This makes analytics accessible for more employees.
What Are The Disadvantages Of Business Intelligence AI?
- Complexity: One disadvantage of business intelligence is how complicated it can be to implement, and this might slow business techniques down.
- Cost: Business intelligence can be expensive for small to medium-sized businesses, and using these systems might make standard business transactions unnecessarily expensive.
- Exclusive: Following on from our above point, business intelligence was first created with big, lucrative businesses in mind. Therefore, a lot of BI systems are out of reach for small and medium businesses.
- Can be time-consuming to implement: It is believed it takes nearly 1.5 years for data warehousing systems (i.e. BI systems) to be totally implemented.
How Do Organizations Implement Business Intelligence Systems?
Let’s take a look at the steps you need to take to implement business intelligence systems.
- Step 1: Raw data is taken from corporate databases, which can be spread across a variety of systems.
- Step 2: The data is refined and turned into the data warehouse. The table may be linked, and data cubes are created.
- Step 3: You can now use your BI system! You can ask queries, ask for ad-hoc reports, or carry out other types of analysis.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is Power BI?
Power BI is a business analysis product created by Microsoft. Their product lets businesses and individuals connect to, create, and visualize data on a scalable platform.
What Is Self-Service Business Intelligence?
Self-service BI is an analytics approach that lets those without a background in IT to explore and analyze data. It gives everybody in the organization control over business data, not just employees in the IT department.
What Are The Drawbacks Of Self-Service Business Intelligence?
The disadvantages of self-service business intelligence are the expensive licensing costs, lacking data granularity, and maybe even too much accessibility.
Final Thoughts
BI systems assist businesses in a variety of ways, from detecting market trends, to any issues in their business that need to be resolved.
BI systems – and particularly self-service BI systems – can be used by everyone in your business, from senior management to data analysts, from the IT department to business users and those who don’t have a background in IT.
While BI systems can help businesses become more accountable for their decisions and improve productivity and flexibility, there are disadvantages too.
For example, BI can be time-consuming and complicated for businesses to implement, and because it was made with big businesses in mind it may be inaccessible to smaller businesses.
We hope our article has given you more insight into business intelligence AI and whether it would be useful for your business!
