I’m completely a
Novice in Business Intelligence J
Business Intelligence is the process of giving businesses
(technically to people who steers the business) insights about what they have
been doing in their operations. This is done by processing data gathered during
business transactions. This data is mostly in unstructured manner. This
unstructured data available in internal and external data sources are
transformed into reportable forms such as graphs as tables. The end result of
business intelligence process is a set of reports and/or a dashboard that allows
non technical business operators to perform ah-hoc queries on their data.
When we hear the term Business Intelligence, more precisely
Intelligence, we tend to have an impression of performing huge amount of
analytical tasks and serve a set of predictions. Bazinga! This is not the case
in business intelligence at all. Yes, Corporations need numbers, facts about how
they are performing in the process of achieving KPIs, but most importantly the data should make sense
about operations to non technical users. This is where a business intelligence
tool gets success, because not every user is going to be a node js geek who is waiting
for npm to finish up his work.
Ideally the tool should support to build data visualizations
in the matter of minutes, or maybe seconds without requiring technical report
development knowledge. For example having functionalities like drag-drop might
be quite interesting. In terms of reporting, the tool should require a minimal
number of steps/clicks to build a report.
Ability to introduce new fields based on calculations using
other existing fields/columns, filtering data based on predefined or auto
modeled parameters, exploring data from different angles, and suggesting data
types, schema and hierarchies automatically are also important in self service
aspects of the tool.
Business intelligence also needs to perform predictive
analytics. The tool should be capable of analyzing historical and current data
to make predictions about future events. It should have functions to more
clearly communicate a huge amount of complex data.
Furthermore it is important that tool could handle data sets
in different sizes. The volume of data being consumed and number of queries
being run simultaneously greatly affects the performance of the tool.
Ultimately business intelligence tool should support to interrogate
data and draw conclusions that help to perform job better. Having a trending
software stack doesn’t make the product a better one. A sustainable set of
technologies that facilitates the product to get job done is what allows it to
stand ahead in the game.
