What is Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence

The best way to describe Business Intelligence is to acknowledge what Business Intelligence is not.

Business Intelligence is definitely not a single product. It may be implemented through variety of excellent applications but it can not be bought in one package and run to solve all your problems.

It is also not a technology. Typical technologies like relational databases ETL tools, servers and Business Intelligence user tools just help to support Business Intelligence, but Business Intelligence is far more than that.

It is not a methodology either. You might consider binding good methodology with Business Intelligence technological solutions and appropriate organizational rearrangements to achieve success, but Business Intelligence can not be described as a methodology. Hans Peter Luhn for the first time, in 1958, described Business Intelligence as „the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal”. In many cases Business Intelligence is known as competitive intelligence.

Business Intelligence definition

Business Intelligence combines technologies, effective methods, products to organize key data needed for profit improvement as well as performance improvement. Business performance can be boosted by certain actions and decisions based on business analyses and information focued around key business processes.

Business Intelligence involves analysis and information that are:

- supporting for decision making and actions;

- improving business performance;

- used in a key business processes.

Business Intelligence leverages that information and analysis to gain improvement in the business performance, still focused around key business aspects and processes. Business Intelligence often uses data from datawarehouses or data stores. Not all operations predicts usage of datawarehouse but it is very common practice.

Business primarly focuses on the process to reduce production costs and increase income, so improving those factors means performance improvement and profit increase. Public sector has other principles – best quality service for people, so their goals are little bit different – managing resources, deal with budget constraints and wise support for all those who need help.

Business Intelligence in practice

In practice Business Intelligence increases sales and profits and reduces costs. Business information alongside business analyses and decisions are processed through core business processes. In particular:

• management processes – such as – monitoring, budgeting, forecasting, controlling and planning;
• revenue generating processes – for example – marketing, channel management, campaign management and of course sales;
• operating processes – like – manufacturing, logistics, inventory management, customer service, order fulfillment and billing.

All above operations are considered to be crucial to effectively bestow Business Intelligence.

Some business representatives insist on dividing Business Intelligence into separated processes such as reporting, querying, business analytics, alert tools and OLAP.

OLAP is an OnLine Analytical Processing – approach invented to rapidly answer multi-dimensional analytical queries. Business Analytics (BA) focuses on providing new insights and comprehends business performance while Business Intelligence centers around past performance and future planning for the wellbeing of the company.

Ways to improve Business Intelligence and benefits from using BI:

- determining tangible advantages;

- enabling data access for the entire company;

- appointing enterprise architects to detect suitable business projects.

Further reading on Business Intelligence, including BI articles, tutorials and blogs.

Please refer to the list of Business Intelligence tools and software vendors on www.bitool.net