The value of Business Intelligence (BI) systems is the capability to create actionable insight on the collected business data. While the Data Warehouse (DW) helps to collect and integrate the data “assets” the companies have the goal of Business Intelligence is to exploit these assets and find the “hidden gems” in it.
The employees and managers working in different organizational levels usually require information in different format, level of aggregation and analysis possibilities:
- Top managers want to look at the KPIs showing the organization as a whole to help strategic decision making
- Managers of a business area want to see the KPIs on their area of responsibility by using standard reports and the aggregated results of related analyses.
- Business analysts need parametrized reports, the ability to run ad-hoc queries and to capabilities to drill down to the details to understand the trends and “interesting findings” in the data.
- On the operational levels the most important is the access to data required to do the day-to-day operations, typically by using standard reports.
Beside the above, there is need to do complex data analysis on trends, segmentation, customer and product behavior, CRM or campaign data, etc. Usually these analyses are supported by specialized tools aimed for data analysis like “data mining” tools or analysis languages (R, Python, etc.).
For the different usage types Business Intelligence solutions provide different visualization tools from the management dashboards to canned reports. The key goal of a Business Intelligence implementation is to provide the appropriate information in the appropriate form to whom and when it is needed. It should also take into consideration the data security and personal rights related questions.
Within Business Intelligence we help our customers by providing consultancy on strategy, technology or vendor selection, doing system design and implementation or even helping with data analysis.