Business intelligence (BI) combines business analytics, data mining, data visualization, data tools and infrastructure, and best practices to help organizations to make more data-driven decisions. In practice, you’ve got modern business intelligence when you have a holistic perspective of your company’s data and can utilize it to drive change, eliminate inefficiencies, and quickly adjust to market or supplier changes.
It’s more of a catch-all term for the processes and methods for gathering, storing, and evaluating data from business operations or activities in order to improve performance. Business intelligence has developed in recent years to incorporate additional processes and activities to aid success. These procedures include the following:
- Data mining:Using databases, statistics, and machine learning to uncover trends in large datasets.
- Reporting: Sharing data analysis to stakeholders so they can draw conclusions and make decisions.
- Performance metrics and benchmarking: Comparing current performance data to historical data to track performance against goals, typically using customized dashboards.
- Descriptive analytics: Using preliminary data analysis to find out what happened.
- Querying: Asking the data specific questions, BI pulling the answers from the datasets.
- Statistical analysis: Taking the results from descriptive analytics and further exploring the data using statistics such as how this trend happened and why.
- Data visualization: Turning data analysis into visual representations such as charts, graphs, and histograms to consume data more easily.
- Visual analysis: Exploring data through visual storytelling to communicate insights on the fly and stay in the flow of analysis.
- Data preparation: Compiling multiple data sources, identifying the dimensions and measurements, preparing it for data analysis.
