What is Business Intelligence?

What is Business Intelligence (BI)
& why does it matter?

Business intelligence (BI) refers to the collection of raw data which is then analysed and turned into actionable insights for a business. It makes business operations and decision making more efficient, reduces costs, and heightens business resilience.

Every business trying to compete and win needs intelligence – about their operations, suppliers, products, partners, and markets. Over the decades, the pursuit of that intelligence has gone by different names, including Decision Support Systems, Management Information Systems, Business Performance Management, Data Discovery, Data Visualisation – all describing the general desire for Business Intelligence (BI). This desire stems from one recurring challenge: how can businesses analyse data to make discoveries that lead to a competitive edge?

In the past, this was a noble yet highly unachievable goal, plagued with disappointment and complexity. But now, with the third generation of BI, we have the potential to spread the power of analytics to every business user in the enterprise – and finally unlock all the value in data.

This is data-driven transformation. It’s likely your company has an abundance of data, yet most companies are only analysing about 10% of it. Beyond that, only 32% of executives say they can then create value from that data. In fact, on average, only a quarter of your workforce knows what to do with data. Horsa, together with software like Qlik, closes the gaps between raw data and actionable insight.

What is an example of Business Intelligence?

BI tools can, and should, be implemented by all teams at a company. Business intelligence can range from measuring the performance of business metrics against benchmarks and goals to segmenting users by demographic characteristics, to generating reports for team and executive decision-making.

For example, Deloitte’s Finance & Control department uses Qlik to help manage the complex task of delivering relevant reports for divisions across the enterprise. As a result: disparate data sources – including the data warehouse and numerous spreadsheets – are connected for a single version of truth, end users are getting data-based insights in addition to standard reporting, and consultants are saving significant time by gaining control of analysis and using powerful visualisation capabilities.

What is the role of Business Intelligence
in my company?

Business intelligence greatly enhances how a company approaches its decision-making by using data to answer questions of the company's past, present and future. Hence, the role of business intelligence in your company is threefold in its diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics.

BI’s diagnostic analytics can be used by teams across your organisation to track critical metrics and organise goals with easily digestible visuals, improving efficiency.

Through predictive and prescriptive analytics we can unlock the future potential of the business by conveying current and historic data patterns to help stakeholders gauge the health of their organisation, alerting them to problems as well as potential improvements, aiding in overall business resilience.

Moreover, prescriptive analytics help companies make predictions on high impact future events and identify new opportunities to make their business more cost-effective.

The financial sector around the world is using Qlik to transform their operations, processes, and outcomes - at the speed of business without waiting for IT.

Executives, management, and staff use Qlik daily to:

What are the sources of Business Intelligence?

A Business Intelligence initiative will only be successful if it incorporates high-quality data at scale. Common data sources include customer relationship management (CRM) software, sensors, advertising platforms, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools. These are things your business likely has already, but now you need to bridge the gap between today’s scattershot use of analytics and the massive increase in value that will occur when every person in a business is empowered to make discoveries within data.

To make that happen, you will need an entirely new way of thinking about how to manage data, deploy analytics, and improve data literacy. This radically democratic approach spreads analytics to every corner of the organisation. We are on a mission to create a data-literate world, where everyone can use data to solve their most challenging problems. End-to-end data management and analytics platforms, like Qlik, bring together all of an organisation’s data from any source, enabling people at any skill level to use their curiosity to uncover new insights. Companies use analytics platforms to see more deeply into customer behaviour, reinvent business processes, discover new revenue streams, and balance risk and reward.

What is Descriptive Analytics?

Descriptive analytics is the interpretation of historical data to better understand changes that have occurred in a business. Descriptive analytics details the use of a range of historic data to draw comparisons and identify patterns or meaning. Data analytics allows you to detect and correct errors, like data duplicates, within data sets with the help of data cleansing. Data analytics helps reduce risks in financial operations by identifying potentially fraudulent customers based on historic data analysis. This can be crucial information when issuing a loan or opening a bank account. For instance, credit risk analysis provides lenders with a complete profile of the customer and an insight that enables them to anticipate customer behaviour. By making use of these analytics techniques, lenders can save their time, money, and resources to target the right customers and monitor or anticipate the risk involved.

What is Data Integrity?

Data integrity is the maintenance of data; assuring the accuracy and consistency of data over its entire lifecycle. Users need to be able to trust the data in order to trust the resulting analysis, insights, and actions taken. Compromised data is of little importance to institutions, not to mention the loss of sensitive data.

Data integrity ensures:

Protecting the validity and accuracy of data also increases stability and performance while improving reusability and maintainability. Qlik’s Data Integration Platform - a unified set of data orchestration and management tools, including real-time Change Data Capture (CDC) - completely automates the process of transferring and transforming raw data into analytics-ready information. Qlik’s Data Integration Platform also includes Qlik Data Catalyst which manages, secures, and controls access to data sets through an enterprise catalogue. This enables you to create an enterprise-wide data schema that encompasses all of your data, from any source, regardless of how big it is or where it’s stored. Since all users have access to the same catalogue, users can gain trust in their data.

Whether you need to identify areas for growth or predict success, Business Intelligence can propel your business to success.

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