Why use bi tools

How is BI different today? What Tools are Important to Business Intelligence in ? Why BI is Critical to Your Business, Regardless of Size Thanks to all of the advancements in BI and the tools sets that allow data analysis to occur, business intelligence is available to nearly every business no matter how big or small. Do you need help understanding how to use BI at your organization? Let's Talk. Tags: analytics big data business intelligence KPI leadership. About the Author. Search for:.

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Business intelligence is the process of surfacing and analyzing data in an organization to make informed business decisions. BI covers a broad spectrum of technologies and methods, from the way that data is organized and analyzed, all the way to how findings are reported.

BI is used to answer how a business performed in the past and why those outcomes came about. Execution of a successful business intelligence strategy requires a strong organization of how data is used from start to finish:.

In order to execute these steps, multiple tools and products need to be employed. There are two subsets of tools to consider here. One class of tools are those used to collect and store data.

Products like Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Snowflake allow businesses to store their data in scalable data warehouses. And other products like Fivetran and Stitch can make it easy to connect data generators into data storage. Instead, the strategies used by a business to collect and store data are often known as the data pipeline.

The tools used in the data pipeline will fall under the label of data engineering. Other tools are used to analyze and report on data; these are the products that are referred to as business intelligence tools. Setting up these BI tools allow you to connect to and query data repositories in order to analyze the data.

They let you create visualizations and dashboards that are easy to read and understand. Good BI tools let you generate and send out reports to stakeholders so they can monitor performance indicators at a high level.

A common distinction between business intelligence and business analytics comes from the type of data analysis being performed. Business intelligence is often characterized as concerned with the descriptive and diagnostic levels of analysis. That is, BI tries to address questions of what has previously happened, what is the current state of things, and why the observed pattern in the metrics came to be.

Business analytics, on the other hand, is concerned with predictive and prescriptive analytics. This type of analysis is concerned with predicting what will happen next, or what a company should be doing next. Performing BA tends to be a more specialized pursuit, since it requires a good descriptive and diagnostic foundation that comes from BI. While some definitions of BI and BA make distinctions between them based on analysis methods or strategies, the differences in domain between past and present vs.

This separation between business intelligence and business analytics can help narrow down what kinds of functionality you want a BI tool to have, and what can be left out. The overall objective of business intelligence is to allow a business to make informed decisions.

A company with a working BI strategy will have data that is accurate, complete, and organized. Business intelligence can be used to show historic patterns to help stakeholders gauge the health of their organization, alerting them to problems as well as potential improvements.

Business intelligence can also help organize teams, keeping them aware of key performance indicators KPIs. Awareness of KPIs through dashboards and reports keeps teams aligned and focused on their goals. Business intelligence tools can be used by all teams at a company, including sales, marketing, and customer support. Data engineers and data analysts can also make use of the convenience of a BI tool when performing their own investigations. A major driving force behind modern business intelligence is increasing the accessibility of data analysis to a larger audience.

Traditionally, calculation of metrics and compilation of reports required a dedicated data professional or team to create. This was a significant bottleneck between a user noticing an interesting or concerning trend and being able to diagnose their observations.

Now, business intelligence solutions are becoming aligned with self-service BI. The challenge is that we often have too much information. This is the proverbial needle in a haystack — except the haystack gets bigger by the day. This also links back to speed: What once might have been a time-consuming end-of-month or even quarterly reporting process can now happen continuously, again in a manner that people can understand and act on.

This spans both the earliest stages of a business strategy as well as its ongoing measurement: BI brings information together and renders it in a consumable format. Organizations tailor it to industry and business contexts. This kind of data is not only valuable for streamlining warehouse operations but can also be used by sales and marketing teams to better communicate with current and potential customers. BI may be able to provide the answer, or at least the basis for an answer.

Turner notes that a retail store owner who wants to determine whether an investment in new equipment will be profitable can run an ad-hoc report to make an informed decision. A restaurant ownership group can use BI tools to compare efficiency across different locations.

A different form of technology-fueled intelligence — artificial intelligence — has decidedly more star appeal than traditional BI. Moreover, you can share reports and dashboards with your team members or other departments within the organization, as well as outside.

This allows enterprises to analyze various patterns and build informed business strategies for improvement. Prepare yourself for job interviews by learning from our Power BI interview questions. Yellowfin BI, one of the best BI tools, is used as an end-to-end analytics platform, combining Machine Learning and data visualization. You can filter tons of data via intuitive filtering features such as radio buttons and checkboxes.

Besides, its mobile accessibility feature and flexibility allow you to use, monitor and understand the dashboard from anywhere. Microsoft Power BI is one of the widely-used open-source BI tools that provide an environment for the analysis, integration, and visualization of data. This tool is efficient and effective in assisting organizations to make informed business decisions.

QlikView is a trending BI tool that allows you to develop apps, dashboards, and visualizations. Besides, QlikView allows you to get a complete overview of the information available in your data. In this blog, you have learned about what BI tools are and the opportunities available in the field of BI. You have also learned about some of the most popular and frequently used BI tools, along with their unique features.

To get a head start in your career in BI, you need to become proficient in any of these tools and further gain experience. Leave a Reply Cancel reply. Your email address will not be published. All Tutorials.