Data currently represents the centerpiece of any business’s core competency to achieve success in the market. Based on data, businesses can make data-driven decisions that lead to flourishing business operations. Having data analytics for your business helps you resolve issues, predict problems and threats, and improve operations. That is what business intelligence solutions help businesses to drive their operations.
What Are Business Intelligence Solutions?
The concept of Business Intelligence (BI) is simple: it is software that ingests and presents business data in a user-friendly format, such as reports, dashboards, graphs, and charts. A business intelligence tool enables users to access a variety of data, including historical and current data, third-party data, and in-house data, as well as semi-structured and unstructured data.
Simply put, users can gain insight into the performance of the business by analyzing this information. Organizations can easily utilize these insights obtained from BI tools to enhance business decisions, detect problems or issues, spot market trends, and predict future business opportunities.
How Do Business Intelligence Solutions Work?
Business Intelligence tools primarily depend on data warehouses for retrieving data and generating visuals. The purpose of a data warehouse is to aggregate data from a variety of sources into a central system for the purpose of business analytics and reporting. Then, the end user can view reports, charts, and maps generated by business intelligence software after querying the warehouse.
Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) is an effective tool utilized by data warehouses to support multi-dimensional queries. It offers a powerful technology for data retrieval, facilitates business intelligence, processes complex analytic calculations, and forecasts trends via smart analytics. There are newer BI solutions that can extract and ingest raw data directly utilizing other technologies like Hadoop.
Key Features of Business Intelligence Solutions
To transform raw data into actionable and meaningful insights, business intelligence solutions should have essential features and precise functionalities to help users easily read data. So, if you are searching for a business intelligence solution, keep in mind the following features and functionalities.
1. Interactive and Executive Dashboards
To help business leaders make informed decisions on their future moves, interactive business intelligence dashboards provide a holistic and real-time view of all key factors. Also, using executive dashboards, you can easily monitor any project or process’ progress by setting and tracking KPIs.
Interactive and executive dashboards enable users to spot process bottlenecks and eliminate them to enhance productivity and accelerate operations. Further, precise and flexible dashboards help decrease the response time, simplify data filtration, and trigger actions.
2. Insightful & Interactive Reports
To convert raw data into insights and ideas, you need to generate insightful and interactive reports. Using them, users can gain a deeper understanding of the analysis within reports and the underlying data upon which they are based. Reports enable users to:
- Go into details and comprehend insights.
- Conduct slice and dice and pivot OLAP analyses.
- Spot trends within data applying advanced analyses like moving averages and regression.
- Detect anomalies by finding outliers through time-series zooming.
- Highlight patterns and trends using conditional formatting.
3. Location Intelligence
Geospatial mapping helps Business Intelligence providers devise business strategies for targeting specific regions. It helps explain why the business is doing well in some areas while failing in other areas. If the treatment is adapted to the location of the end user and consumer, better engagement can be achieved.
Location intelligence generally empowers all-around planning, prediction, and problem-solving. It utilizes special data, such as demographics, traffic, and weather, to find optimal locations in retail site selection, manage assets in real time, and fix vital infrastructure. For the most part, it offers a competitive edge.
4. Predictive Analytics
To succeed in a dynamic business environment, you must make accurate predictions. Generating predictive analytics makes BI solutions leverage data mining, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to utilize current and historical data to make accurate forecasts.
By leveraging predictive analytics, business intelligence solutions can detect fraudulent transactions, inaccurate credit applications, identity theft, and false insurance claims. Also, customers’ buying behavior can also be analyzed to gauge cross-selling and upselling opportunities.
5. Security and Data Protection
Besides the data visualization, you need to securely store and access your data. Having a business intelligence that collects, filters, cleanses, and organizes data in a secure environment that protects those data is a necessity. Business intelligence solutions should be compliant with data privacy laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Moreover, you need to have full capability to manage who and when anyone can view the data and which data to be accessible. Based on the functionality of permissions and roles, admins and data scientists can control their data viewers.
6. A/B Test Implementation
A/B test is an essential component of any data analysis process. So, any business intelligence solution should enable users and offer them the functionalities to easily implement the A/B test. A/B testing gives analysts the capability to establish a hypothesis and test it to come up with the best possible insights.
With the functionalities and features delivered by the BI tool, the hypotheses can be tested easily to apply the results and gain the maximum benefit of data collection.
7. BI Mobility
Accessing apps via mobile is an essential component of any business solution to utilize collaborative features and enhance productivity. Even for managers, it is crucial that they can easily access information wherever and whenever they are. So most BI solutions deliver a mobile-optimized dashboard that generates interactive reports.
Conclusion
Depending on their requirements, different organizations require different business intelligence features. Start by investing in a solution that provides core features such as dashboarding and visualization, reporting, data integration, etc. Additionally, you can upgrade your solution to include predictive analytics, mobile business intelligence, augmented analytics, and more. Finally, Alnafitha IT can provide businesses with many tools and solutions for Business Intelligence.
