BI is all about revealing the most important parts of data from a business perspective. It’s often the first step towards data science and broader data utilization. Similarly, it’s often the primary stage of building data-driven organizations and/or products.
Business intelligence technologies include business analytics, data analytics, data mining, data visualization, data tools and infrastructure, as well as data relevant best practices. Business intelligence services help you make data-driven decisions by giving a broad view of your company’s data.
A business intelligence strategy uses data to drive change within an organization. A modern BI strategy prioritizes:
- flexible self-service analysis
- governed data on trusted platforms
- empowered business users
- speed to insight
Business intelligence systems and business intelligence analytics collect data, store and analyze it, and turn it into actionable insights.
These insights provide users with detailed intelligence about the state of a business and help inform tactical decisions. Employees and stakeholders can access the data via user-friendly business intelligence dashboards, reports, and charts
What are the services of business intelligence?
In general, it involves custom BI implementation consisting of design, development, and deployment of BI dashboards. From a more technical perspective, the services include:
- Data preparation. Collect and store unbiased data for analysis
- Data mining. Uncover trends using databases, statistics, and machine learning
- Descriptive and statistical analysis. Undergo preliminary data analysis to discover out what happened; take those results and explore further using statistics
- Business intelligence data visualization. Transform your analysis into easy-to-understand visual representations like charts, graphs, and histograms
- Business intelligence reporting. Share your data analysis with stakeholders, enabling them to make decisions
- Monitoring and alerting. Receive critical business information via notifications
Technical BI consulting services like those offered by Netguru are useful. We help clients gain a better understanding of their needs and our business intelligence expertise enables us to recommend optimal solutions.
The role of business intelligence consultants is to provide a self-serve analytics platform that uncovers hidden data insights according to users’ specific requirements. From a product perspective, the role of BI is to supply embedded analytics, so that end-users can experience data-driven analytics.
What is the role of business intelligence?
Business intelligence solutions are data-driven decision support systems (DSS).
By using business intelligence tools, you’re able to analyze data yourself instead of relying on IT. The data insights you have access to help you back up decisions with facts and proof rather than gut feelings and judgment.
The output you receive using BI solutions is easy to understand and navigate and based on hard numbers. It helps answer questions like why sales are dropping and what customers are commenting on social media.
By offering past and current insights, BI builds an accurate picture of your business and helps you create an effective business strategy. As a result, business performance and revenue improve, you gain a competitive advantage, and reach (or surpass) your business goals. Other benefits include:
- Better ROI, visibility, and transparency
- Achieving a superior understanding of customer behavior
- A means to monitor operations and make ongoing improvements
- Enhanced process execution management
There are many BI tools on the market that are already proven and built to serve custom business needs – below are just several of them. It’s always worth considering available options before making a decision on which one to choose for your use cases. Contact us if you’d like to find out more.
Commercial business intelligence software
Tableau. One of the market leaders, Tableau offers an advanced product with a visual-based data exploration experience. It’s highly intuitive, providing progressive and specialized functionalities.
It’s common to hear business analysts and BI specialists say they enjoy working with Tableau, and its free public version has many enthusiasts. There’s also a SaaS option fully hosted by Tableau or on-premise.
Microsoft Power BI. This is another market leader and often considered a default option for Microsoft customers due to tight alignment with Office 365 and Azure.
It offers a variety of built-in functionalities that help create BI solutions adjusted to specific business needs. It’s available as a SaaS in Azure cloud or on-premise.
Qlik. This option is also considered a leader, with strong augmented analytics capabilities. Besides standard visual data exploration, it offers context-aware suggestions for insights and self-service data discovery for business users. Qlik Sense is available as a client manager or a SaaS solution.
Looker. Acquired by Google in 2020, Looker is tightly integrated with Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It offers modern BI functionalities and in-database architecture optimized for various cloud databases.
Its centralized and agile data modeling layer allows you to analyze the data where it lives, without repetitive data extraction tasks. It can be hosted on GCP, AWS private cloud, and on-premise as well.
Sisense. This choice offers an end-to-end analytics platform with functionalities enabling both business users and expert analysts. One of its core capabilities is advanced embedding, allowing you to improve data-driven customer experience in your products.
Sisense Cloud is a SaaS solution, but the tool is also available in a private cloud and on-premise.
AWS QuickSight. This one is relatively new compared to other tools, but it's gaining major adoption due to its tight integration with AWS cloud. Its a fully managed, cloud based service which scales automatically without any server setup or management. Pay-per-session pricing model gives a lot of flexibility and helps with scaling-up your analytics in most cost-efficient way.
Open-source BI software
Metabase. This open-source business intelligence tool has functionalities that are simpler compared with commercial products.
However, its paid option provides enterprise support and should be sufficient for standard use cases. Metabase provides a visual query builder for self-service analytics and is available as fully-managed SaaS or on-premise.
Apache Superset. This open-source option is cloud-native BI software that provides powerful and intuitive data exploration and visualization functionalities. It’s based on modern architecture and is fast – able to handle data at petabyte scale.
What are the five key phases of business intelligence?
1. Data sourcing. Extracting info from multiple data sources – databases, third-party system APIs, and sometimes flat files. The key is to integrate with data sources that are most likely to contain business-relevant information.
2. Data analysis. This is about gathering useful knowledge from the data such as estimating trends, summarizing info, validating models, and predicting missing information and future trends.
3. Situation awareness. Here, it’s all about filtering out irrelevant info and presenting the remainder in the right way For example, to make a decision, users need relevant info in the context of their business.
4. Risk assessment. This involves uncovering plausible potential actions and weighing up the current and future risks, costs, and benefits of choosing one decision over another.
5. Decision support. This stage involves warning you about important events like acquisitions and market changes, alongside helping you make better business decisions by presenting you with the info you need, when you need it.
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