The impact of Business Intelligence on the quality of decisions made

Enterprises collect vast amounts of data generated in increasingly modern IT resources. Instead of making it more accessible, this data often makes it challenging to make decisions about the organization’s activities. What is Business Intelligence? How can implementing BI solutions that turn disordered information into practical conclusions help a company? Find out!

Business Intelligence (BI) – definition

Business Intelligence (abbreviated as BI) transforms available data into valuable knowledge necessary to make business decisions. This process illustrates the BI pyramid – open, unrelated data is its ground. The next level of the pyramid is information related to context. The knowledge – the third level – is concerned as dynamically related information. At the top of the pyramid is wisdom, which means action leading to making the right business decisions based on BI.

In a broader sense, business analysis is a set of concepts, methods, and processes used to optimize decisions by collecting, storing, analyzing, presenting, and integrating business data. Any enterprise can use business analysis, regardless of the size or area of ​​operation.

Types of BI systems

Organizations in almost any industry now have access to much data they can use for profit. BI plays an increasingly important role in the computerization of enterprises that must make the most accurate business decisions to stand out in the market.

Depending on the purpose, we can distinguish several types of BI systems. They are:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) 
• Decision Support Systems (DSS)
• Executive Information Systems (EIS) – specialized DSS systems for senior management, facilitating strategic decision-making.
• Geographic Information Systems (GIS) – geographic data processing systems supporting the decision-making process.
• Management Information Systems (MIS) – support business management (financial analysis and manufacturing processes).
• Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) – multidimensional analysis and multidimensional data structures.

Business Intelligence tools

More and more companies have decided to implement revolutionary analytical systems, allowing them to use the collected data better. Advanced BI tools, such as Qlik, Tableau, Birt, Jasper Reports, or Microsoft Power BI, efficiently process large amounts of data from various areas of the company’s operations. These tools collect data on an ongoing basis and create clear visualizations from it.

How does BI improve the quality of decisions made?

Traditional systems are insufficient, especially when dealing with vast amounts of constantly flowing information. Business analytics systems come to the rescue of companies. Thanks to them, it’s possible to evaluate data from many sources and present them as comprehensive reports that facilitate searching for correlations and conclusions.

Analytical systems facilitate the flow of information made in real-time to employees related to a given process in the organization. BI reports provide comprehensive data to management, which significantly eases and speeds up business decisions. By providing a consistent view of data in the organization for various system users, BI class systems significantly reduce potential errors and outdated data. Modern business analytics also means effective forecasting of the company’s activity, optimizing the budget, freely following market trends, or analyzing the activities of competitors.

Data is one of the most valuable assets of any business. However, gathering information is not enough – making decisions based on it should never be a matter of chance. Effective processing of incoming data, which may contribute to business development, would not be possible without the modern analytical tools of the BI class. Their implementation can benefit organizations from many different industries and at different levels.