There is a lot of information out there for your company to keep track of - what customers are purchasing, sales trends, inventory, and profit & losses to name a few of the bigger ones. Wouldn't it be great to be able to access this information quickly and easily and then put it to good use?
Welcome to the world of business intelligence. Business intelligence, also known as BI, describes the tools and technologies that help you understand your data. Business intelligence is vital for any company looking to excel in today's rapidly evolving business environment. Business intelligence gives your company up-to-the-minute information on your past, present and future by turning a mass of jumbled data into key summaries and detailed reports that can guide critical business decisions.
Business intelligence includes functions such as reporting, analytics and data mining, and one of the easiest and quickest ways to gain insight into your data is to use a business intelligence software solution that will allow you to harvest in-depth data and generate BI reports for internal and external use.
A business intelligence reporting tool can give you the ability to:
- Call upon your company data at a moment's notice
Mathematics alone make us feel the limits of our intelligence. For we can always suppose in the case of an experiment that it is inexplicable because we don’t happen to have all the data. In mathematics we have all the data ... and yet we don’t understand. We always come back to the contemplation of our human wretchedness. What force is in relation to our will, the impenetrable opacity of mathematics is in relation to our intelligence.
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)
- Connect multiple, dissimilar data sources and quickly and simply and define the relationships between data sets, no matter how convoluted they are
- Locate specific data using a very user-friendly interface
- Select data in a narrative style, which is natural to an individual's approach in focusing on desired data
- Present meta data as you wish it displayed and described
- Display selected data in a spreadsheet with critical numbers represented by a gauge in a summation cell for each row
This city is neither a jungle nor the moon.... In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of bleeding energies. Close up, it is a fairly legible printed circuit, a transistorized labyrinth of beastly tracks, a data bank for asthmatic voice-prints.
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
- Generate reports on your schedule that can be delivered to multiple individuals in a variety of ways
Business intelligence reports come in many forms, depending upon the reporting software you use. Some programs let you create graphical tools such as charts, gauges and dashboards that automatically refresh to display up-to-date information that is easily and quickly understood. Some of these reporting software packages allow you to really dive deep into your information using sophisticated tables. Also, they can include the ability to include outer information - growth and economic trends for example. This will give you a better grasp on how market forces affect your bottom line.
Business intelligence reporting tools, while varying in cost and capabilities, all have one thing in common: getting your company the information needed to succeed in today's market.
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