Why is business intelligence important

Read the digital transformation ebook: Transformation Takes Practice. BI is about making information readily available and accessible to the people who need it to do their jobs at any level of the organization.

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.

The reason why no one can agree? Business intelligence and business analytics, or BA, are also very similar and are connected. Some folks believe the main difference comes down to time: business intelligence helps in the day-to-day operations and how things look in the present, whereas business analytics helps business planning for the future, such as using predictive analytics to figure out why things are happening and how things will look in the future.

Individuals that handle business analytics, typically have a background in mathematics or statistics or an online masters degree in business analytics.

Business intelligence experts should also be good with numbers and have an analytical mind. Regardless of whether or not there are similarities and differences between business intelligence and business analytics, companies may need to figure out which tools to use and which software to invest in to get the valuable insights they need and make timely and accurate decisions.

Some may argue that the most important benefit of BI and BA is improved decision making. Businesses can use this data to make decisions such as entering new markets and what steps to take to mitigate risks. They can also make decisions regarding operational processes or restructuring departments. The era of big data is upon us. Business Intelligence helps companies monitor trends, adapt to varying market conditions, and improves decision making at all levels of the organization.

It will do everything for you: tracking and reporting relevant metrics; interpreting data in a more visual, easy-to-understand way; and collecting everything in a sleek dashboard that can be shared with your team, leadership, and stakeholders. We are swimming in a sea of data. But only those with the tools to properly access and act on that data will be able to fully take advantage and see the benefits to their business. Those who do however, will be able to increase productivity, stay competitive, and enable the entire company to make faster, smarter decisions with the data collected.

To learn more about how you can start doing that right now and how BI can help your business, request a demo now. Getting Started. Connect your data, build metrics, share insights. Help Center. About Us. Our Culture. Our Customers. This article will serve as an introduction to BI and is the tip of the iceberg.

Tableau's Explain Data feature helps to quickly identify possible explanations of outliers and trends in data. All of these things come together to create a comprehensive view of a business to help people make better, actionable decisions. Over the past few years, business intelligence has evolved to include more processes and activities to help improve performance.

These processes include:. Great BI helps businesses and organizations ask and answer questions of their data. Business intelligence can help companies make better decisions by showing present and historical data within their business context. Analysts can leverage BI to provide performance and competitor benchmarks to make the organization run smoother and more efficiently.

Analysts can also more easily spot market trends to increase sales or revenue. Used effectively, the right data can help with anything from compliance to hiring efforts.

A few ways that business intelligence can help companies make smarter, data-driven decisions:. Try Tableau for free to create beautiful visualizations with your data. Try Tableau for free. Businesses and organizations have questions and goals. To answer these questions and track performance against these goals, they gather the necessary data, analyze it, and determine which actions to take to reach their goals. Data is processed and then stored in data warehouses.

Business intelligence includes data analytics and business analytics, but uses them only as parts of the whole process. BI helps users draw conclusions from data analysis.