Business Intelligence

The term Business Intelligence (BI)refers technologies, applications and practices for collecting, 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). Business Intelligence is sometimes used interchangeably with briefing books, reports and query tools and executive information systems.

Ø Data mining

Ø Online analytical processing

Ø Querying

Ø Reporting

Benefits of Using Business Intelligence

Ø The potential benefits of business intelligence programs include:

Ø Accelerating and improving decision making

Ø Optimizing internal business processes

Ø Increasing operational efficiency

Ø Driving new revenues

Ø Gaining competitive advantages over business rivals.

Ø Identifying market trends

Ø Spotting business problems that need to be addressed

Uses of Business Intelligence Systems and Tools

Business intelligence toolsare essentially data-driven Decision Support Systems (DSS). BI is sometimes used interchangeably withbriefing books,report and query tools,andexecutive information systems. With these tools, business people can start analysing the data themselves, rather than wait for IT to run complex reports. This information access helps users back up business decisions with hard numbers, rather than only gut feelings and anecdotes.

Tools Which Optimizes Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence software 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. Software elements support reporting, interactive “slice-and-dice” pivot-table analyses, visualization, and statistical data mining. 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.

Business Intelligence Software Solutions

Power BI

Microsoft’s Power BI is a cloud-based business analytics service for analysing and visualizing data. Cloud-based business analytics service for analysing and visualizing data.

Power BI lets you be productive and creative with the reports and analytics.Churning out useful information fromthe data and creating a visuals reports is a multi-step process.

Processes in Power BI

Connecting to your data:

Power BI lets you connect to a wide variety of data sources. And, you can either usePower BI Desktop orPower BIServicesto connect to your data.Your options are toimportitinto Power BI or touploadyour file.

Connecting data from various sources to Power BI

Shaping of data:

Once your data has been loaded, you can shape the data according toyour needs. Shaping or transforming the data includes renaming columns or tables, changing the text to numbers, removing rows,setting the first row as headers, and so on.

Shaping or Transforming of data

Modelling data:

This step is basically to enhance the data with relationships, calculations, measures, hierarchies etc. that can be used to find business insights. Also, you can write a query to enhance data for better visualizations and analytics.

Data Modelling

Data visualization:

This is probably where you play around with data and visualization types. With a variety of visual tools and custom visual gallery, you can create stunningreportsfor your organization effectively.So, a business user simply could mash up the data without writing even a single line of code.Exactly, it’s that easy!!

Visualizing your transformed data

Ways to share analytics reports with your organization

Publishing data reports:

Well, usingPower BI Services, you can export or publish reports securely and set up automatic data refresh which provides near-real-time analytics of trends and indicators for everyone.

Publish your reports using Power BI services

With real-time power BI dashboards, you can get a 360-degree view of your business and you can instantly check when your business needs your attention.

Power BIgatewayslet you connect with SQL Server databases, Analytical Services, and many other data sources to your dashboard in Power BI and reporting portals, embed Power BI reports and dashboards to give you a unified experience.

Tableau

Tableau is a desktop BI system intended to help you visualize and understand your company’s data. Instead of a chart builder, it gives you a live visual analytics tool for unlimited data exploration. Together with interactive dashboards, you can identify visual patterns faster, discover hidden insights quickly and reveal opportunities that you can take advantage to improve decision making and improving company’s performance. The software is able to connect to multiple data sources – spreadsheet, SQL database, cloud apps like Salesforce, on premise reports – regardless of your data size. You can display and publish results with dashboards and share them with anyone. If you’re already using Tableau Online or Tableau Server, data can flow and move seamlessly from one platform to another. This facilitates self-service analytics from whatever device, letting you get instant answers for your business questions.