The overall goal of business intelligence(BI) is to enable enterprises to make informed decisions. Companies with a working BI strategy have accurate, complete and organized data. Business intelligence can be used to uncover historical patterns and help stakeholders assess organizational health and alert them to problems and potential improvements.
Business intelligence can also help organize teams and keep them informed about key performance indicators (KPIs). Through dashboards and reports, he is aware of KPIs to keep his team aligned and focused on their goals. Easy access to metrics and KPIs frees up time and effort to perform tasks that impact business performance.
Modern business intelligence and self-service BI?
A key driving force behind modern business intelligence is making data analytics accessible to a wider audience. Traditionally, a dedicated data expert or team was required to calculate metrics and assemble reports. This was a significant bottleneck between users noticing interesting or worrisome trends and being able to diagnose those observations.
Today, business intelligence solutions are geared toward self-service BI. With self-service BI, anyone can directly access data and perform analysis without contacting data team members directly. Self-service BI tools typically have a graphical interface that makes it easy to perform common data tasks without knowledge of a query language.
Features of business intelligence software?
To perform business intelligence tasks, data engineering tools must be used to collect and store data so that it can be used by business intelligence tools for analysis and reporting. If you're looking for a solution to help your business derive insights from your data, here are some things to keep in mind to meet your needs:
Connect to data sources:
First and foremost, you need to be able to access your data to perform business intelligence. It's important that her BI tools on the analytics side can connect to other solutions that handle data storage. These data sources can include databases such as MySQL, data warehouses such as Amazon Redshift or Google BigQuery, or ad-hoc data files in CSV format. Make sure your BI tools also have access to the latest data to make timely decisions. Avoid workflows that require custom data pipeline setup. This is because it can cause interruptions when raw data changes or unexpected events occur.
Data query:
In addition to the ability to connect to data sources, it's also worth seeing how easy it is for BI tools to create connections between data sources. A good BI tool makes it easy to pull queries from different data sources and merge them into new data sources. Connecting and merging data from multiple data sources gives you the opportunity to gain additional insights that are not possible alone.
Data visualization and dashboards
Data visualization is a core component of most business intelligence applications. A good chart can convey insights more quickly than a simple table of numbers. When considering a BI tool, look at the types of charts available and how much you can customize using them. You can accomplish an amazing amount with a relatively small number of chart types, but consider your use case carefully to see if your organization needs software that can support chart types that are particularly specialized.
