(16) What do you understand by term ‘Business Intelligence’? Explain with examples.
Answer:
- Business Intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven
process for analyzing data and presenting meaningful information to help users
make more informed business decisions.
- BI comprises of various tools, applications and
methodologies to:
- collect data from internal and external sources,
- prepare it for analysis,
- design and run queries against the data,
- create reports, dashboards and data visualizations for users.
- Following are the some of the benefits of BI :
- improved decision making
- improved business processes,
- improved operational efficiency,
- driving new revenues,
- gaining competitive advantages over business rivals.
- opportunity to identify market trends and spot business problems that need to be addressed.
- BI data supports both strategic and tactical
decision-making processes.
- Business Intelligence combines a broad set of data analysis applications which includes:
- ad hoc analysis and querying,
- enterprise reporting,
- online analytical processing (OLAP),
- mobile BI,
- real-time BI,
- operational BI,
- BI programs also include advanced analytics such
as data mining, predictive analytics, text mining, statistical analysis and big
data analytics.
- Example of BI includes ability to answer below mentioned queries:
- How many products sold in a specific area for a given time period?
- Effect of decline in inventory level. What is the revenue loss?
- Impact
of customer profile and sales revenue. Can customer profile changes support a
high- priced product?