Business intelligence (BI) is more than just a dashboard. The term “business analysis” (BA) is a term related to business intelligence, and there's a lot of confusion about where they overlap.
Business intelligence is often
characterized by being related to descriptive and diagnostic levels of analysis. For example, financial services firm Charles Schwab used business intelligence to obtain a comprehensive view of all its branches in the United States to understand performance metrics and identify areas of opportunity.As you can imagine, this is important for BI, as companies create more and more data every year, and BI platforms have to keep up with the increasing demands placed on them. However, business intelligence concepts involve a great deal of confusion and, ultimately, unnecessary industry jargon. Each BI tool offers advantages and disadvantages among its functions, so determine which are the most important for your company and select the tool that best suits your needs. The importance of business intelligence is growing at the same rate as data is being produced, making it less and less understandable to the normal human brain.
Business intelligence data is usually stored in a data warehouse created for an entire organization or in smaller data marts that contain subsets of business information for individual departments and business units, often linked to an enterprise data warehouse. It's becoming increasingly important for companies to have a clear view of all their data to remain competitive, and this is where business intelligence (BI) tools come into play. This was a top-down approach in which the IT organization was driving business intelligence and most, if not all, of the analysis questions were answered through static reports. In real-time business intelligence applications, data is analyzed as it is created, collected, and processed to provide users with an up-to-date view of business operations, customer behavior, financial markets, and other areas of interest.
While products that collect and store data are important parts of the BI process, they're usually not what people think of when it comes to business intelligence. As you've read before, the basic concepts of business intelligence essentially improve your ability to see useful trends and patterns related to your company and the market. Today, more and more organizations are adopting a modern business intelligence model, characterized by a self-service approach to data. The sporadic use of the term business intelligence dates back to at least the 1860s, but it is attributed to consultant Howard Dresner when he first proposed it in 1989 as a phrase that encompasses the application of data analysis techniques to support business decision-making processes.
