Business Intelligence - Transform Data Into Information

Business Intelligence: transform data into information

With the term Business Intelligence (BI) we define the instruments that help businesses to make data-driven decisions, thus starting from the collection, analysis, and visualization of big data. The advent of BI transformed the business logic, making the decisions easier and time-saving.

In particular, a good use of BI platforms gives the opportunity to:

• Identify market trends;
• Analyze consumer behavior;
• Compare data with competitors;
• Monitor the performances;
• Improve the decision process;
• Improve the supply chain;
• Find anomalies and issues;
• Forecast positive outcomes.

BI platforms primarily collect information from data warehouses, combining business analytics, data mining, data visualization, and data infrastructure.

Data analytics: it focuses on the data analysis process to find trends and insights.

Data mining: The process of extracting information from a large amount of data to identify anomalies, patterns and correlations to predict outcomes.

Business Intelligence follows four main steps to collect and transform data into useful and understandable insights:

1. Collection and transformation of data

2. Idenficating tendencies and incongruences

3. Visualizing and showing of data

4. Comparing present data with historical data

5. Prior to their transformation, BI uses the ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) method to collect data from data warehouses. In this phase, BI softwares executes queries.

6. Data mining makes use of automation to run a quick analysis of data to find trends and/or anomalies, which can give a first insight with regard to the current status of the company.

7. It’s time to collect the results into reports to show to stakeholders. Graphs, dashboards, and diagrams are more than welcome.

8. Modern BI ensures reduced and long-term time of action (and of revision).

To summarize:

Analysis of data → Comparing present data with the current performances → Comparing the current performances with the actual goals → BI executes queries on the data and shows the results to stakeholders and employees.

Conclusions

Businesses have been benefiting from the advent of modern Business Intelligence, giving access to their data analysis and final reports to other departments as well rather than just the IT one.

In current times, BI instruments and platforms are being used in the marketing sector, finance, and even within HR departments. HR professionals do make use of BI to monitor certain trends related to its employees: their attendances, productivity rate, and turnover rate. In this sense, BI should help HR professionals to make better decisions when coming to hiring and training.

In conclusion, the reason why BI has become essential for any business of success is that it allows us to make data-driven decisions instead of hypothesis-driven decisions. BI can give answers to questions like:

Why are the sales dropping in this region? Where do we have extra stocks? What clients say on social media?

sources:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/it-it/what-is-business-intelligence/

​​https://www.tableau.com/it-it/learn/articles/business-intelligence

https://www.ibm.com/it-it/topics/business-intelligence