Business Intelligence (BI) refers to applications, technologies and practices or the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of business information. The purpose of Business Intelligence is to support better business decision making. Essentially, Business Intelligence systems are data driven Decision Support Systems (DSS).
Importance of Business Intelligence tools or software solutions
Business Intelligence systems provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Most often using data that has been gathered into a data warehouse or a data mart and occasionally working from operational data. Applications tackle sales, production, financial and many other sources of business data for purposes that include business performance management. Information is often gathered about other companies in the same industry which is known as benchmarking.
Nowadays, organizations are starting to see that data and content should not be considered separate aspects of information management. Instead integrated enterprise approach can be used to manage data. Enterprise information management brings Business Intelligence and Enterprise Content Management together. Last year witnessed the emergence and growth of big data and analytics as mainstream tools of business intelligence. With the rising complexity of the business intelligence (BI) environment, it is important to adapt to latest technologies to cope with market competition.
Master Data and Quality Management: Master Data is a unified set of business data that encompasses customer, supplier and product data and everything in between. In the business intelligence context, data quality management is a key priority in any organization. The demand for a unified central database will continue to grow next year.
Data Discovery & Visualization: Data discovery has been at the top of the BI trends list for a while and continues to do so. Data visualization as we know is the technique to communicate data or information by encoding it as visual objects. We may call it visual communication. Due to this, visual analysis is a much sought-after feature by enterprises to absorb data and make better-informed decisions. Among the many tools, tableau is well-known in this field.
Self-Service Business Intelligence: Self-service business intelligence (BI) is an approach to data analytics that enables business users to access and work with corporate data even if they do not have a background in statistical analysis, BI or data mining. Self-service BI tools allow users to filter, sort, analyze and visualize data without involving the organization’s BI and IT teams. Thus, contributing to being in the top trends of BI.
Data Governance: It is a set of processes, that stakeholders use in technology to ensure the management and protection of critical data. It is a four-way framework comprising availability, applicability, integrity and security. It acts as an important tool for cyber protection.
Multi-cloud Strategy: BI tools make it possible to store sensitive data locally and other data on the cloud. BI technologies help in viewing and manipulating multi-cloud data on a single dashboard.
Business Intelligence is a must-have asset now for any organization. For businesses looking for top solutions, there is no better solution than BI, to obtain the most crucial data insights. Nowadays, there are a number of BI technologies that help businesses to get the most out of their data. Both in terms of insights and ease of data comprehension. It is thus necessary for businesses to adopt one of the BI trends to prepare for future data needs.
