The Business Intelligence Guide

Definition Of Business Intelligence

The definition of business intelligence has evolved over the past 10-15 years. At that time, the 'intelligent organisation' was one that valued collaborative sharing of knowledge supported by intranets, blogs and content management systems.

Today, business intelligence is a much more integrated, highly strategic, management tool that supports every day decisions on how to operate the business to better achieve corporate objectives.

Business Intelligence may therefore be defined as "the process of analyzing large amounts of corporate data, usually stored in large databases such as the Data Warehouse, tracking business performance, detecting patterns and trends, and helping enterprise business users make better decisions".

Benefits

A business intelligence solution helps organisations:

• identify market opportunities
• know where market share is unsatisfactory
• better understand their profitability drivers
• identify unacceptable cost areas
• gain an accurate view of sale and/or distribution costs, per channel, per customer, per transaction, per day
• recognise business areas of high performance
• identify the key performance indicators [KPI's] to use to measure capability
• calculate sales commissions, number of sales closed, highlight good and poor performers
• track whether strategies for certain markets or customers are working and driving business value
• get instant insight to the exact profit by company of each sale

and much, much more

Getting Started In Business Intelligence

Getting started in BI is more a matter of overcoming some of the challenges and how to best leverage planning activities.

There are currently a lot of issues around some of the capabilities not included in BI tools, and in the raw politics around business intelligence.

The most common of these include:

1. Ownership of BI program
2. Ownership of data
3. BI Skillsets and roles

NEXT PAGE: Drivers of Business Intelligence

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