Business intelligence: A complete overview PDF

# Business intelligence: A complete overview ## What is business intelligence? Business intelligence combines business analytics, data mining, data visualization, data tools and infrastructure, and best practices to help organizations make more data-driven decisions. Modern BI solutions prioritize...

# Business intelligence: A complete overview ## What is business intelligence? Business intelligence combines business analytics, data mining, data visualization, data tools and infrastructure, and best practices to help organizations make more data-driven decisions. Modern BI solutions prioritize flexible self-service analysis, governed data on trusted platforms, empowered business users, and speed to insight. ## How does BI work? - **Promote & Govern**: IT/BI Professional - **Access & View**: Information consumer, content creator - **Interact**: - **Share**: - **Analyze & Discover**: ## BI methods - **Data mining**: Using databases, statistics, and machine learning (ML) to uncover trends in large datasets - **Reporting**: Sharing data analysis to stakeholders so they can draw conclusions and make decisions. - **Performance metrics and benchmarking**: Comparing current performance data to historical data to track performance against goals, typically using customized dashboards - **Descriptive analytics**: Using preliminary data analysis to find out what happened - **Querying**: Asking the data-specific questions, BI pulling the answers from the data sets - **Statistical analysis**: Taking the results from descriptive analytics and further exploring the data using statistics such as how this trend happened and why - **Data visualization**: Turning data analysis into visual representations such as charts, graphs, and histograms to more easily consume data - **Visual analysis**: Exploring data through visual storytelling to communicate insights on the fly and stay in the flow of analysis - **Data preparation**: Compiling multiple data sources, identifying the dimensions and measurements, and preparing it for data analysis ## How BI, data analytics, and business analytics work together 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. Data scientists dig into the specifics of data, using advanced statistics and predictive analytics to discover patterns and forecast future patterns. ## Benefits of BI - Data clarity - Increased efficiency - Better customer experience - Improved employee satisfaction ## How to develop a business intelligence strategy - Know your business strategy and goals. - Identify key stakeholders. - Choose a sponsor from your key stakeholders. - Choose your BI platform and tools. - Create a BI team. - Define your scope. - Prepare your data infrastructure. - Define your goals and roadmap. ## Categories of BI analysis There are three major types of BI analysis, which cover many different needs and uses. - **Predictive analytics** takes historical and real-time data and models future outcomes for planning purposes. - **Descriptive analytics** is the process of identifying trends and relationships in data using historical and current data. - **Prescriptive analytics** takes all the relevant data to answer the question, “what should my business do?” ## Advantages and Disadvantages of BI - **Advantages**: - Data visibility - Accurate reports - Streamlined processes - **Disadvantages**: - Initial cost - User resistance - Data skills gap ## How to choose a BI platform - Intuitive to use - Variety of dashboard and visualization options - Smart insights - Alerts for good and bad metrics - Built-in artificial intelligence (AI) - Deployment flexibility - Integration with other platforms and applications - Data connectivity - Embedding in business applications ## BI dashboards Arguably one of the most useful tools in BI are dashboards, which allow complex data to be aggregated and viewed all in one place. The challenge is building the best dashboard for your needs. - Interactivity - Real-time data - Customizable interface - Standard templates ## BI and big data As the data atmosphere grows and the gathering, storage, and analysis of data becomes more complex, it's important to consider the relationship between BI and big data. Data experts define it by "the four Vs": Volume, velocity, value, and variety. ## Using self-service business intelligence (SSBI) Self-service business intelligence (SSBI) is characterized by IT managing the data (security, accuracy, and access), allowing users to interact with their data directly. Modern analytics platforms like Tableau help organizations address every step in the cycle of analytics-data preparation in Tableau Prep, analysis and discovery in Tableau Desktop, and sharing and governance in Tableau Server or Tableau Cloud. This means that IT can govern data access while empowering more people to visually explore their data and share their insights.