Businesses have always needed some level of reporting to gain insight into the working of the business which is provided through business intelligence tools. In this age, the data collected by businesses have grown in volume to a point that it is not manageable by traditional business management software and provisions have to be made for leveraging and analyzing this data.
Business intelligence (BI) is an area of expertise that tries to deal with the business data that is being collected in a large volume. This big data be handled using the Business intelligence software and taking the raw data as input, the BI tools and solutions try to manipulate the data and perform data analytics and reporting to make use of this big data and generate beautiful visualizations to study the data trends and make predictions based on the historical data available.
What is big data?
Big data is the term that refers to the bulk of data collected and stored for businesses. This big data is usually streaming from multiple data silos and is managed by different database management systems across the organization. The format of data is also sometimes different being a mixture of unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data.
The volume of data makes it hard to manage and sometimes data needs lots of refinement and manipulation to bring it to a state that is understandable by data analysts. Big data is often manipulated using multiple techniques like natural language processing, machine learning, and data mining. Data scientists that work with big data are usually equipped with skills in the area of mathematics and statistics, programming, and artificial intelligence.
“Without big data, you are blind and deaf in the middle of a freeway.” – Geoffrey Moore, management consultant, and theorist.
What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence is making use of big data to identify data trends and make predictions for the future of business based on this data. Business intelligence tools and techniques help data analysts to manipulate data and generate charts and reports for informing the management about the current working situation of the business. It gives detailed insight into the business performance and identifies common mistakes and flaws in the operation of the business. The data analysts team and management and top leaders can then work together to develop action plans to bring changes in the strategic plans and marketing techniques to positively impact the focus areas and increase revenue and conversions for the business.
Without business intelligence solutions, businesses will not be able to pinpoint areas of trouble that might need personalized focus to improve business performance. The study performed by using these business intelligence tools can be divergent and would focus on a range of areas to understand the business working and find out ways to improve performance by getting the most value from the information available through big data analytics.
Feature of BI
Business intelligence includes a range of tools and techniques that allows data analysts to study big data in different lights and come up with predictions about the business operations and product popularity in the market. Data science is an emerging platform that is manipulating business data into actionable insights using Business Intelligence tools.
Here we have studied some features of business intelligence that are the foundation of performing big data analytics using a business intelligence software solution. These features make the work of data analysts easier and accommodate them for performing big data analytics.
Data reporting
Data reporting forms the basis of big data analytics and is the main feature offered by business intelligence software. Most BI software offers a variety of data reports and allows data analysts to choose the report layout that they want to use for designing and creating reports. Different reports can outline different data sets and help data analysts study the target dataset in detail. Among many data reports available, master-detail reports, multi-level reports, summary reports, and line and bar graphs are most popular in highlighting the data set and providing required information.
Data Dashboards
Data dashboards are a very powerful feature available in business intelligence tools that help users to monitor and compare data streaming from different reports. Multiple reports in different formats can be displayed simultaneously and data analytics can be performed by studying them together. This is really beneficial for time-critical data that is changing rapidly and needs quick and timely decisions. SQL reporting tools are very useful in generating customized reports for data analysts so that they can use these reports for designing dynamic data dashboards.
Predictive analysis
Another important feature that utilizes natural language processing as well as machine learning techniques is predictive analysis. It focuses on a large data set of structured or unstructured data and performs analytic techniques to identify data trends in the historic data. This helps to identify customer interest in products and help make predictions about customers’ engagement and interests.
What-if analysis
What-if analysis is another powerful feature that can help management make faster decisions with confidence. This analysis studies data to answer specific business-related questions and informs data analysts about key performance indicators. The answers found using the What-if analysis can help management find the impact of their business decisions.
Artificial intelligence
Many artificial intelligence techniques including machine learning and pattern recognition are being employed by data analytics and reporting tools. The data team uses reports generated using AI technologies to identify data trends and visualize different scenarios for detailed analysis of data coming from different data warehouses.
Let us know if there are any questions or comments.
