Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence is a broad field of study. The major thrust of business intelligence theory looks at certain factors to make high quality decisions. These factors include customers, competitors, business partners, economic environment and internal operations. Here is some more information on how these factors help businesses make quality decisions.

Without customers a business can't survive. Businesses need to sell their products and services. Business intelligence helps businesses understand their customers better, looking at their preferences, helping businesses adapt to their customers demand. Business intelligence is used to collect data from customers usually within the marketplace

Not only do businesses have to keep customers satisfied buying their products, they also have to compete with competitors that are constantly looking to poach a business’s customers and make them their own. Businesses today must constantly evaluate the effectiveness of their competitors and choose smart strategies that not only hold their competitors at bay, but also grow their own businesses market share.

Business partners are essential to any business, whether it is suppliers, payment processing companies, customer support companies or delivery companies that help your business throughout its cycle, it is important to make sure that all businesses partners associated with your business are in balance with you.

Internal operations are usually defined as the ongoing day to day activities of a business or organization. If you want your business to be successful, you need to be able to view your business's strengths and weaknesses on a daily basis.

The advantages gained by implementing business intelligence are:
• Enhanced reaction and sensitivity of the organization toward the customers
• Identification of customer demands
• Capability to respond to market transformations
• Improved optimality within operations
• Effective use and saving of wealth
• Intricate study assisting for future prospects
• Optimum utilization of organizational resources

Business Intelligence Self Service Platform from a business perspective
We can easily define "Business Intelligence Self Service" as a service provided by an open Business Intelligence platform that enables business users to access the information they need by themselves, using an easy to understand User Interface (UI) that is defined in business terms and not IT jargon. Perhaps the most critical feature of such a service is to eliminate the "IT touch" for the users to create new reports; the platform should support the capability to combine existing data elements into a custom report

Business intelligence refers to in-depth analysis of company data for better decision-making. The technology and processes that make this analysis possible take unwieldy collections of information and translate them into organized, readily-accessible, human-readable compilations of data. With an effective BI tool, companies can easily track their own operations, their customers' activity patterns, and industry trends. These fact-based assessments help companies work toward specific goals with confidence.

The business intelligence process can be broken down into the following three stages:
1. Data
2. Information
3. Knowledge

Raw data is gathered and processed into information. The information must be filtered and arranged into meaningful patterns. The knowledge drawn from that data analysis helps to form the business intelligence of a corporation.