By Deeksha Malhotra

What is Business Intelligence?

According to a 2007 survey sponsored by Teradata, leaders in Business Intelligence (BI) have a 54% probability of taking excellent action on real-time data compared to 13% of market-average companies (Daniel). The substantial difference between the percentages leads to the question--What is BI and how can a company use it to improve its performance? BI “is an umbrella term that refers to a variety of software applications used to analyze an organization’s raw data” (Mulcahy). If a BI system is created well, it has the potential to help companies identify and fix its flaws in order to function better. However, having a BI system alone is not enough--businesses must extract and analyze the correct information, get the right people involved, and take action to address their core issues (Levinson).

Deciding what data you want and using it

A BI system can be immensely helpful to a company if it is used to obtain significant information and the company takes the time to analyze it. BI makes it possible for a company to acquire data concerning its performance, both internally and externally. If the numbers obtained are too broad or unimportant, however, then the data attained is useless. Therefore, a company must decide what specific and important data should be acquired before creating a BI system. Once useful information is extracted, a company must analyze it in order to gain it's full benefits. For example, when a company discovers that a department is below par in productivity, the company should take the time to analyze why that is and figure out how the problem can be fixed. Remember that data alone is not enough to benefit a company. A company must analyze the data and fix any discovered problems in order to benefit from a BI system.

Business Intelligence encourages openness

While a BI system can provide valuable information, a company can only improve itself if it shares the new information with the appropriate people in the company. Traditionally, the upper management of an organization does not share much of its information with its employees. However, the BI system encourages open communication among all staff members in order to produce accurate data. In addition, if employees have access to the data produced, they may notice trouble spots within their department that upper management may have overlooked. The BI system works optimally when information is inputted and shared by everyone.

Taking Action 

After gaining and analyzing information obtained from the BI system, a company must take action in order to rectify any problems discovered. A BI system is beneficial to a business because it lets people see trends of loss or profit in their early stages. This allows companies to either do damage control or increase inventory in the early hours of a project, benefitting both the corporation and its customers. If all the steps outlined in this article are taken, BI will provide a business much gain with little cost since helps identify a problem before it snowballs into something more sizeable (Dragoon). To recap, here are the steps an enterprise should take in order to utilize BI to its full potential:

1. Identify what information should be obtained using the BI system
2. Create the BI system
3. Analyze the data produced and investigate solutions to problems discovered
4. Take action by changing procedures, developing applications, changing the amount of inventory, etc. in order to solve any issues that are highlighted by Business Intelligence.

JNC Solutions, Inc. can help you with Business Intelligence