The overall goal of business intelligence is to help businesses make informed decisions. Businesses with an effective BI strategy have accurate, complete, and well-organized data. Business intelligence can uncover historical patterns that help stakeholders assess the health of the organization and alert them to problems or potential improvements.
Business intelligence also helps keep teams organized and up-to-date on key performance indicators (KPIs). Knowing your KPIs through dashboards and reports helps keep your team aligned and focused on your goals. Easy access to metrics and KPIs also frees up time and energy to complete tasks that impact business performance.
Business intelligence tools can be used by all teams within a company, including sales, marketing, and customer support. Team members and managers can use the results of BI tools. Data engineers and data analysts can also take advantage of the practical benefits of BI tools when conducting their own research.
A key driver of modern business intelligence is making data analysis more accessible to more users. Traditionally, a dedicated data expert or team was needed to calculate metrics and create reports. This created a significant bottleneck between a user noticing an interesting or concerning trend and their ability to diagnose that observation.
Today, business intelligence solutions are geared towards self-service BI. Self-service BI allows anyone to directly access data and perform analysis without having to contact a member of the data team directly. Self-service BI tools typically have a graphical user interface that makes it easy to perform common data tasks without knowledge of a query language. While data teams are still important to manage the data and determine who has access to it, self-service BI empowers data specialists to perform more complex and advanced analysis.
To perform business intelligence tasks, data must be collected and stored using data engineering tools and made available to business intelligence tools for analysis and reporting. If you’re looking for a solution to help your business gain insights from data, keep the following in mind to ensure it meets your needs.
First and foremost, you need access to data to perform business intelligence. It is important to ensure that your BI tool for analysis can connect to other solutions that handle data storage. These data sources can be databases such as MySQL, data warehouses such as Amazon Redshift or Google BigQuery, or ad-hoc data files in CSV format. Ensure that your BI tool has access to the latest data to make timely decisions. Try to avoid workflows that require setting up custom data pipelines, which can cause disruptions if raw data changes or unexpected events occur.