The components of Business Intelligence grants businesses the capability to translate complex data into navigable information from which to help inform decision-making. It is essential to recognize that BI goes beyond technology. Think of it as a framework to allow better decision-making through the use of the right tools and easier processes.

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence is a combination of technologies, processes, and practices for collecting, analyzing and visualizing data. BI represents a real-time performance snapshot of the business that is intended to provide IT professionals and business owners with the ability to be reactive and strategic. BI enables data in massive heaps to turn into usable information that decision makers can act on through dashboards or reporting utilities.

What’s the Role of Business Intelligence Today?

BI is not a future goal or strategy. In a world with no or very few geographical boundaries, BI has become a requirement. Businesses will leverage BI technology to find and forecast trends, leverage savings, work more efficiently, and offer consumers better experiences. The real value in BI is the speed at which it allows us to adjust to everything that is continuously evolving. Organizations cannot afford to have BI set as an option – it is a necessity to thrive.

What are the Important Parts of Business Intelligence?

Even though they have distinct roles, all parts of BI are important together because they form the essence of BI. Data Sources are the data the system draws from. Data Warehouses organize the data in a stored structure and act as the repository. OLAP tools allow for the complicated calculations and analysis. Visualization tools allow decision makers to understand insightful information in visual representations like dashboards and reports. These tools contribute to a culture of sustainability – learning and continuous improvement.

Finally, once organizations can understand what the roles of all the parts are and how they work together, they can play around and design a BI framework that sees and understands the whole bowl, therefore leveraging all data being analyzed.

Data Integration and Quality in BI

One of the most formidable challenges in BI is consolidating data from multiple sources. Integration brings information together into a single view, breaking down silos and promoting better decision making. Ensuring the quality of the data is as important. Even the best platforms will fail if their inputs are incorrect, inconsistent or incomplete.

This is why IT practitioners recommend processes like data cleaning, data validation and regular data audits. With good quality integrated data, companies can trust the information they see, which leads to more confident and informed decisions.

The Impact of Cloud Computing on BI

Cloud computing has changed the BI landscape drastically. Traditionally used as an alternate storage option, the cloud now allows for processing and real-time analytics, in addition to remote access to large datasets, at a lower cost than on-premises infrastructure.

This means faster insights for BI. Much faster! It also means that organizations will be able to afford BI across their organization, removing the need for waiting for reports or using antiquated spreadsheets. BI has the potential to create collaboration for enterprise teams in different locations, who can actually work from the same dataset with BI, and share the same results, increasing the accuracy and productivity of teams. Today, cloud-based BI is at the center of most organizations strategies.

Data Lakes and Data Warehouses

Modern BI needs two complementary data architectures. Data lakes are used to store huge volumes of raw, unstructured data, which allows analysts to think creatively when applying advanced analytics and machine learning models to the unstructured data. Data warehouses, often leveraged by cloud-based options, store cleaned, consistent, structured data for optimized reporting and trend analysis. Together, they provide organizations with flexibility: the lake for exploration and innovation, the warehouse to provide insights the executives can trust, act upon, and present.

Predictive analytics is the next step in BI, going beyond looking at historical data to predict what will happen next. BI focuses on what has occurred, while predictive analytics allows organizations to see what will happen next.

For example, predictive models could identify customer behaviours, signal changes in demand, or describe operational risk, all before they happened. A predictive aspect allows businesses to anticipate and develop strategic plans, optimize resource allocations, and create an advantage over competitors.

Data mining is essential to BI, allowing organizations to apply algorithms to large datasets, identifying underlying patterns, correlations, and opportunities that are not apparent. Data mining is different from standard reporting, which has a strong focus on what has occurred. BI data mining usually answers the questions of why it happened and what is likely to happen next. This deeper level of analysis is helpful for organizations stakeholders and decision-makers with valuable insights to consider customer’s experiences and to assess operations and invent new opportunities in their competition.

Integrating a Business Intelligence Strategy into Your Organization

To integrate BI, organizations need to be strategic. The first step in integration is to assess your current data environment and identify gaps. Organizations then align their capabilities with the goals they have for BI and choose appropriate tools, while looking for scalability, security, and purpose.

It is also important for organizations to guarantee that a culture has started to emerge, which encourages their employees’ obvious use of data in their everyday decision-making. Therefore, organizations need to invest in training, develop obvious roadmaps, and encourage cross-department collaboration to ensure the analytics culture becomes obvious. This helps ensure that external and internal BI have taken hold in the organization. This is a perfect example of how to integrate a practical business intelligence (BI) strategy in an organization.

Barriers and Solutions to Business Intelligence

Naturally, every organizations BI journey presents barriers. The most common obstacles are poor data quality, siloed/compartmentalized information, and increasing user resistance. Overcoming these barriers requires a combination of technical and cultural solutions: standardized processes for data and documents, compatible integration tools and user-friendly platforms to maximize user interest.

Ongoing training and user support make a world of difference to your organization’s successful integration of BI. When users feel confident using BI online tools and platforms, adoption rates climb, and so does the ultimate value of BI within the organization.

Future Trends in BI

In our experience, BI is moving toward automation, artificial intelligence and multi-layer cloud adoption. Increasingly, machine learning will power predictive insights, helping organizations identify actionable insights at speed and precision. Cloud BI will provide increasing levels of collaboration and scalability in the use of advanced analytics from even the smallest organization.

Each of these trends expresses one truism: BI will only become further embedded in how organizations operate and compete. Organizations that are nimble and adapt to the shift in BI will be able to maintain a leading position, reflecting the ongoing and future aspirations of that BI.

Unlocking the Full Value of Business Intelligence for Your Organization

Understanding how the components of business intelligence provide organizations the full value of their data. BI enables organizations to determine when, how and analytical data are usable, useable for more than simply creating reports. BI embraces processes and practices that utilize all forms of data, quality of data, predictive analytics, spatial and cloud analytics and prescribed use of predictive analytics.

TVG Consulting can help guide organizations in the adoption of BI strategies while ensuring the ultimate strategy is aligned with the organizations goals and objectives to meet organizational outcomes and results. Contact us today to determine how BI can redefine your business infrastructure into and thoroughly data driven and informed organization.