Which of the following statements best defines business intelligence (BI)
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The term Business Intelligence (BI) refers to technologies, applications and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of business information. The purpose of Business Intelligence is to support better business decision making. Essentially, Business Intelligence systems are data-driven Decision Support Systems (DSS). Business Intelligence is sometimes used interchangeably with briefing books, report and query tools and executive information systems. Show
Importance of Business Intelligence tools or software solutionsBusiness Intelligence systems provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations, most often using data that has been gathered into a data warehouse or a data mart and occasionally working from operational data. Software elements support reporting, interactive “slice-and-dice” pivot-table analyses, visualization, and statistical data mining. Applications tackle sales, production, financial, and many other sources of business data for purposes that include business performance management. Information is often gathered about other companies in the same industry which is known as benchmarking. Business Intelligence TrendsCurrently organizations are starting to see that data and content should not be considered separate aspects of information management, but instead should be managed in an integrated enterprise approach. Enterprise information management brings Business Intelligence and Enterprise Content Management together. Currently organizations are moving towards Operational Business Intelligence which is currently under served and uncontested by vendors. Traditionally, Business Intelligence vendors are targeting only top the pyramid but now there is a paradigm shift moving toward taking Business Intelligence to the bottom of the pyramid with a focus of self-service business intelligence. Self-Service Business Intelligence (SSBI)Self-service business intelligence (SSBI) involves the business systems and data analytics that give business end-users access to an organization’s information without direct IT involvement. Self-service Business intelligence gives end-users the ability to do more with their data without necessarily having technical skills. These solutions are usually created to be flexible and easy-to-use so that end-users can analyze data, make decisions, plan and forecast on their own. Companies such as PARIS Technologies have taken an approach to making Business Intelligence an easily integrated tool for other end-user tools such as Microsoft Excel, Access, Web browsers and other vendors. BI platforms traditionally rely on data warehouses for their baseline information. A data warehouse aggregates data from multiple data sources into one central system to support business analytics and reporting. Business intelligence software queries the warehouse and presents the results to the user in the form of reports, charts and maps. Data warehouses can include an online analytical processing (OLAP) engine to support multidimensional queries. For example: What are sales for our eastern region versus our western region this year, compared to last year? “OLAP provides powerful technology for data discovery, facilitating business intelligence, complex analytic calculations and predictive analytics,” says IBM offering manager Doug Dailey in his data warehousing blog. “One of the main benefits of OLAP is the consistency of information and calculations it uses to drive data to improve product quality, customer interactions and process improvements.” Some newer business intelligence solutions can extract and ingest raw data directly using technology such as Hadoop, but data warehouses are still the data source of choice in many cases. History of business intelligence The term business intelligence was first used in 1865 by author Richard Millar Devens, when he cited a banker who collected intelligence on the market ahead of his competitors. In 1958, an IBM computer scientist named Hans Peter Luhn explored the potential of using technology to gather business intelligence. His research helped establish methods for creating some of IBM’s early analytics platforms. In the 1960s and 70s, the first data management systems and decision support systems (DSS) were developed to store and organize growing volumes of data. “Many historians suggest the modern version of business intelligence evolved from the DSS database,” says the IT education site Dataversity. “An assortment of tools was developed during this time, with the goal of accessing and organizing data in simpler ways. OLAP, executive information systems and data warehouses were some of the tools developed to work with DSS. By the 1990s, business intelligence grew increasingly popular, but the technology was still complex. It usually required IT support — which often led to backlogs and delayed reports. Even without IT, business intelligence analysts and users needed extensive training to be able to successfully query and analyze their data. More recent development has focused on self-service BI applications, allowing non-expert users to benefit from their own reporting and analysis. Modern cloud-based platforms have also extended the reach of BI across geographies. Many solutions now handle big data and include real-time processing, enabling decision-making processes based on up-to-date information. Why business intelligence is important Business intelligence gives organizations the ability to ask questions in plain language and get answers they can understand. Instead of using best guesses, they can base decisions on what their business data is telling them — whether it relates to production, supply chain, customers or market trends. Why are sales dropping in this region? Where do we have excess inventory? What are customers saying on social media? BI helps answer these critical questions. “Business intelligence provides past and current insights into the business,” says Maamar Ferkoun in his IBM cloud computing and business intelligence blog. “This is achieved through an array of technologies and practices, from analytics and reporting to data mining and predictive analytics. By providing an accurate picture of the business at a specific point in time, BI provides an organization with the means to design a business strategy based on factual data.” Business intelligence helps organizations become data-driven enterprises, improve performance and gain competitive advantage. They can:
Retailers, for example, can increase cost savings by comparing performance and benchmarks across stores, channels and regions. And, with visibility into the claims process, insurers can see where they are missing service targets and use that information to improve outcomes. Business intelligence best practices Organizations benefit when they can fully assess operations and processes, understand their customers, gauge the market, and drive improvement. They need the right tools to aggregate business information from anywhere, analyze it, discover patterns and find solutions. The best BI software supports this decision-making process by:
Advanced BI and analytics systems may also integrate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to automate and streamline complex tasks. These capabilities further accelerate the ability of enterprises to analyze their data and gain insights at a deep level. Consider, for example, how IBM Cognos Analytics brings together data analysis and visual tools to support map creation for reports. The system uses AI to automatically identify geographical information. It can then refine visualizations by adding geospatial mapping of the entire globe, an individual neighborhood or anything in between. According to a report on digital reinvention by the IBM Institute for Business Value: "Looking five years out, 58 percent of 1,100 executives we surveyed in the Digital Reinvention Study expect new technologies to reduce barriers to entry and 69 percent expect more cross-industry competition." "Advanced analytics enable deeper business intelligence and consumer insight to be drawn from big data, producing information that ranges from descriptive to predictive." Case Study North York General Hospital Which of the following Defines business intelligence BI )?What is business intelligence? Business intelligence combines business analytics, data mining, data visualization, data tools and infrastructure, and best practices to help organizations make more data-driven decisions.
Which of the following statement is true about business intelligence BI?Which of the following statement is true about Business Intelligence? B. BI has a direct impact on organization's strategic, tactical and operational business decisions. Explanation: All of the above statement are true.
Which describes business intelligence BI ):?Business intelligence (BI) refers to the procedural and technical infrastructure that collects, stores, and analyzes the data produced by a company's activities. BI is a broad term that encompasses data mining, process analysis, performance benchmarking, and descriptive analytics.
What are the 4 concepts of business intelligence?However, for the purpose of this article, we will explain the 4 basic components within business intelligence:. The data itself (raw data). The data warehouse.. Data access, analytics, and presentation.. Data dashboarding and reporting.. |
