Business Intelligence (BI) is a strategic tool that enables modern companies to leverage information from a wide range of sources to create critical, actionable, and ultimately efficient decisions to enhance their profitability and overall operation. Business Intelligence (BI) helps businesses to uncover innovative new business possibilities, identify customer segments, extract emerging business opportunities, measure the effectiveness of strategic decisions, and implement strategies for achieving business objectives. With the increasing complexity of businesses’ business problems and objectives, Business Intelligence is fast becoming a key player in strategic business planning. In fact, recent estimates suggest that over $1.5 billion is spent each year on consulting BIN and consultancies.
Business Intelligence (BI) is an important aspect of Small Business Intelligence(SBI). Small Business Intelligence (SBI) is a methodology by which smaller businesses can gather, process, manage, analyze, and implement relevant business intelligence and knowledge. For example, business intelligence tools and metrics such as surveys, customer relationship management (CRM), market intelligence, and analytics tools are often utilized to gain insight into business trends, consumer behavior, business models, competitive scenarios, investment opportunities, government policy, international business, and more. A recent article in Business Intelligence Magazine highlighted five areas where analysts rely on BIN metrics to help them assess a company’s health, security, safety, environment, and growth. Business Intelligence’s five focus areas include:
Market Intelligence Small organizations spend a significant amount of time researching and developing market conditions in order to determine the needs of the marketplace and how best to serve it. Companies that perform market intelligence research utilize various techniques to collect market intelligence data including surveys, market research, demographic research, and market forecasting. Some organizations conduct a variety of tasks to gather market intelligence data. They may conduct interviews, surveys, focus groups, visit businesses, or even observe people while they work. Business intelligence experts may use any number of methods to collect this information.
Actionable Data The ability to analyze data and take action is at the core of business intelligence. By allowing analysts access to raw data they are better able to solve problems quickly and make informed decisions. Because much of this data-driven problem solving depends on analyzing a variety of sources, analysts must be able to work with a wide variety of software and different formats.
Processes and Models Decision-making processes and models can be complex and difficult to manage. When problems arise analysts must evaluate business intelligence data and information in order to understand how the process and model affect business results. Analyzing business intelligence data requires a systematic approach. Business intelligence experts must effectively manage multiple sources and apply models and processes to improve business effectiveness. Effective decision-making requires a solid understanding of business intelligence and data analysis techniques and the ability to test and measure solutions.
Getting Data and KPIs right is critical to business intelligence success. If analysts are relying on information obtained from simple data analysis and only using part of the picture, solutions may not be as effective. To get the full picture business intelligence experts to need to rely on several key performance indicators and the ability to analyze multiple data sets.