Modern Business Intelligence Solutions
The phrase ‘Business Intelligence’ has become a catch-all term for a variety of analytics tools, processes, and solutions aimed at empowering organizations to harness their data collection efforts into something useful with the ability to impact their success in a meaningful way. Depending on which source you are citing from, there will assuredly be a vast difference in how the phrase is defined. As an example, look at the way two very prominent technology firms define the same exact term:
Business intelligence (BI) is a set of technological processes for collecting, managing and analyzing organizational data to yield insights that inform business strategies and operations.
– IBMBusiness intelligence (BI) uncovers insights for making strategic decisions. Business intelligence tools analyze historical and current data and present findings in intuitive visual formats.
– Microsoft
The commonality is the requirement of the transformation of data collected by an organization into something greater than can be leveraged into data-driven insights or solutions. Once achieved, they can be used to inform leadership and stakeholders of how best to proceed forward down a given path towards success or alternatively as a way to avoid potential failures.
The first step towards the implementation of a successful business intelligence solution is to identify any data sources that will need to be collected and transformed via an Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) process before the data can be used in your analyses. Only once the data has been cleaned and transformed will it be ready for storage in your Data Warehouse solution. Once the data has been prepared properly, it can be accessed or delivered to the data analysis or visualization tool of your choice, or utilized in preparing data sets that will power your planned Data Science projects.
This is the starting point where you can now begin to analyze your data to reveal any trends or patterns that may have gone previously unnoticed or overlooked. Most modern BI tools will allow users to develop a variety of analytics solutions including but not limited to: exploratory, descriptive, statistical, and predictive.
After your analysis has been completed, you will then want to leverage your data storytelling skills by visualizing your findings to make the results easily digestible and shareable with your stakeholders in the forms of charts and graphs. If so inclined, you could even choose to develop an interactive dashboard powered by the same data warehouse and containing the very same data used in your original analysis without fear of any discrepancies.
At this point you will be ready to capitalize on the insights you have uncovered to make data-driven business decisions that will have a meaningful impact. By leveraging your organization’s historical and current data in this way, your business intelligence solution will empower leaders with the ability to make both real-time and long-term strategic decisions regarding many different problems, while increasing organizational effectiveness and competitiveness. There are clear benefits to be gained through an effective BI implementation including clearer reporting across your organization, data consolidation, efficiency gains via data monitoring, deeper data insights which fuel faster decision-making.
If you have any questions about business intelligence solutions for your own organization or would like a free consultation on any of the solutions discussed above, please feel free to contact us by email: info@softcrylic.com.
The Data Science & Analytics team at Softcrylic also hosts a monthly Dashboard in a Day (DIAD) webinar in partnership with Microsoft where we walk attendees through a hands-on, start-to-finish business intelligence solution of an interactive dashboard using the Microsoft PowerBI platform.
For anyone interested in attending our next scheduled session please register using this link: https://www.softcrylic.com/dashboard-in-a-day/
