What Makes Business Intelligence Better?

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.