Business Intelligence Software - Definition of Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) is about providing accurate, meaningful data in a consistent, standardized way. Good information enables good decisions. The goal of Business Intelligence is to enable data-driven decision-making. Decisions guided by Business Intelligence are more stable, decrease staff workloads, save time, and are more effective long-term. Informed decisions result in higher profits, better service, and satisfied customers.

Businesses today produce seemingly infinite amounts of data ?both quantitative and qualitative ?about their clients, customers, and financials. A large amount of this information is automated, and in fact, organizations are quite often overloaded with so much data from different sources that it becomes impossible to sort through and determine which sets of data are most important in terms of actual impact on the company’s health and management. In order to analyze information on all areas of financial planning - assets, liabilities, expenditures, costs, revenues, cash flow, customer service, human resources - data from several disparate systems and formats (databases, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents) must be combined and reconciled. The amount of overlapping and duplicate data information from different sources or in different formats can impede the analytical process, and sometimes even mislead decision-makers by comparing non-standardized sets of data. Business Intelligence applications combine and standardize these sets of data and enable users to filter, organize, compare, contrast and analyze information across departments and over selected periods of time. This enables business managers to not only determine what the most immediate and important decisions to make are presently, but also better predict the future.

Business Intelligence applications are becoming the dominant business-planning tool not only in the IT industry, but also for a wide variety of organizations worldwide, including education, automotive, medical, and entertainment (see customer examples). Business Intelligence makes businesses more competitive in that it allows each organization, regardless of size or industry, to determine how to maximize their unique business model by enabling them to see how their different aspects of business management are interacting with each other, immediately and in an easily interpreted format. Business managers need to have access to critical business information, as well as be able to easily share that information with partners and clients.

Business Intelligence applications come in various forms. While all are designed to be integrated with a company's existing systems, some are fairly "predesigned" - not necessarily "off the shelf", but not entirely customizable. These applications can usually be integrated and implemented in a short time and are relatively inexpensive. Larger organizations can work with providers to develop unique and highly customized systems. Business Intelligence interfaces, or dashboards, can range from internal database applications to spreadsheet formats to completely web-based platforms.

Business Intelligence dashboards are intuitively designed to making finding, analyzing, and distributing information efficient and accurate. Organizations can now put information in the hands of all of their employees, not just a few marketing or financial analysts. This is increasingly important as on-line businesses grow and are more competitive. Services like mortgage financing and insurance agents used to have a much longer period of time to process customer information, but online companies have reduced that time in half. Some business services, like air travel and insurance, are now moving online like shares of stock.

Real-time information allows managers to confidently provide forecasts, quickly pinpoint problems, and deploy their resources to the most critical places and opportunities. Sales and Marketing teams need to have access to real-time, comprehensive supply and demand information. By utilizing a Business Intelligence application, a company can not only enable more people to access and use information, but also increase efficiency in order to reduce the length of sales and service cycles. Whether an organization is an online company or not, Business Intelligence is critical in order to remain competitive.

Visit Business Intelligence Customer Success Stories for examples of successful Business Intelligence strategies used by various companies worldwide.