Business intelligence: what it is, what are the advantages and what solutions we offer

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In the past, IT professionals were the primary users of business intelligence applications. However, BI tools have evolved to be more intuitive and easier to use, allowing a wide range of users from a variety of organizational domains to operate the tools.

Definition

Business intelligence (BI) has been defined in many ways. By the earliest definition (1958), business intelligence was viewed as "the ability to understand the relationships between presented facts in such a way as to guide action toward a desired objective.".

A broader and perhaps more current definition of this discipline is the following: business intelligence is the process of collecting business data and transforming it into information that is meaningful and actionable towards a strategic objective. Or, more simply, BI is the effective use of data and information to make sound business decisions. Although it may not sound like it, BI is different from analytics.

What is a BI solution?

Business intelligence includes data analytics and business analysis, but uses them only as part of the overall process. BI helps users draw conclusions from data analysis. People who specialize in data analytics dig into the specifics of data, using advanced statistics and predictive analytics to uncover key processes and forecast future ones. Data analytics asks, „Why did this happen and what might happen next?” Business intelligence takes these models and algorithms and breaks down the results into actionable language.

Today's business intelligence solutions offer applications to help the user gain actionable insights at every stage of the process. These include applications for data preparation, analysis, data visualization, reporting, and collaboration for use on-premises, in the cloud, and even away from the office.

Transforming data into actionable information

Business Intelligence contains the following elements:

• Reporting: the process of accessing data, processing it and delivering it inside and outside the organization;
• Analysis: identifying essential processes and establishing relationships in a group of data;
• Data mining: extracting initial information from data;
• Data quality and interpretation: the greater or lesser correlation between the data and the objects they represent in reality.
• Predictive analytics: a branch of data mining that attempts to predict probabilities and trends.

Reporting and analysis are the core elements of business intelligence and the sphere in which most BI vendors compete, adding and refining features to their solutions.

The general business intelligence process is as follows:

• Data collection and organization through reporting;
• Conversion into meaningful information through analysis;
• Making actionable decisions aimed at achieving a strategic objective.

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Although business intelligence doesn't tell users what to do or what will happen if they follow a certain course of action, BI is more than just generating reports. Rather, BI provides people with a way to examine data to understand trends and gain insights by simplifying the effort required to search, merge, and query the data needed to make sound business decisions.

Why BI from KodingTech?

BI applications can include a variety of components, such as tabular reports, graphs, or dashboards. A robust BI solution, such as those provided by KodingTech, can integrate these disparate data sources into a coherent, real-time reporting platform usable by customers, partners, employees, managers, and executives.

Why BI from KodingTech? To get relevant and actionable information! Efficiently and extremely quickly. For this reason, we do not implement BI visualization solutions for a single data source/application. We combine multiple sources, standardize them and then build the questions and their display in a visually coherent way. The steps to reach this information are:

• Business analysis and establishment of data sources;
• ETL process – extract, transform, load;
• Building a Data Warehouse solution and establishing a refresh rate;
• Construction of BI visuals for managerial analysis and distribution to other users.

BI solutions from KodingTech

The BI technologies used by KodingTech are capable of processing large amounts of structured and sometimes unstructured data to identify, develop and even create new strategic business opportunities. The goal of BI solutions is to transform raw data into relevant information and simplify their interpretation in order to integrate them into intelligent business decisions.

For more detailed information for clients, among the main technologies used by KodingTech, we can mention: Power BI, Azure Analysis Services, Microsoft SQL Databases, Microsoft Azure Events Hub, Azure Log Analytics, Azure Synapse Analytics (ex Microsoft SQL DataWarehouse), Metabase, Databox.io.

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Are you overwhelmed rather than helped by the data you collect and are you unable to transform the multitude of data into information with strategic applicability and business practice? Are creating intelligent reports and segmenting access to them complicated and daunting? These common needs can be met with great success by turning to business intelligence solutions from KodingTech that will help you make truly strategic decisions for your company.