The concept of business intelligence dates back to the late 1980s when Howard Dresner, a consultant, proposed it as a broad category for using data analysis methodologies to improve the decision making processes in a business. Today business intelligence or BI is termed as the use of technology to analyze data in order to come up with meaningful information that enables organizations and business to make accurate business decisions.
Business intelligence entails several activities, software, tools and approaches that assist in data collection, data analysis, query execution, the creation of reports and visual representation of processed data in form of spreadsheets, charts or dashboards. BI technologies have enabled expert business operation on the basis of facts and not imaginations or probability.
BI has several benefits that include fast and improved decision making; increasing business operation ability; identifying problems facing the business and provide solutions to them; identifying new business venture; help a business cab competition by gaining a competitive advantage over rivals; and help business study market trends enabling it to strategize on how to make profits.
With the introduction of “self-service” BI technologies business owners, executives and operators are now able to use BI applications on their own hence reducing their traditional dependency on technicians who would run analyses and later on produce reports and visual presentations for them. The data fed to BI system contains both historical data and already processed data from other systems, therefore, enabling the system to produce data which supports both strategic and intelligent decision-making.
Business Intelligence institutes several data analysis applications like ad-hoc analysis, online analytical processing, mobile, real-time and operational BI. Other applications may be part of business intelligence include location intelligence, cloud; enabling information storage and backup, open source, and software as a service BI. BI technology also has with software that can conduct data visualization in that they can use the data processed to construct charts, graphs, and dashboards that show business performance metrics in a comprehensive way. At the time these programs will also integrate advanced analytics like data mining. But in this case, the advanced analytics works will be done by a team of data scientists and statisticians separately while business data and less sophisticated analytic work would be done by a BI team.
Data pertaining business intelligence is stored in data warehouses that also hold an organization’s information. Data quality and integration tools are used to cleanse, integrate and consolidate data before it is fed into a BI application this ensures the accuracy and consistency.
Just like any software development process, BI application development process involves several parties i.e. architects, developers, business analysts, data managers and business end users to make sure the application meet all its required functionality. They use the Agile software development technique where the BI application in development is divided into small parts and functionalities are added to it in an iterative and incremental manner. This enables a business to integrate the new functionalities in a consistent pace and also gives developers time to make adequate changes to the BI application in development as business requirements change every now and again; they can, therefore, keep up with the changes in business needs.