What's good to know about business intelligence?

Business intelligence (BI) is a method for analyzing business data to make informed decisions. It analyzes business information and transforms it into actionable insights. These insights guide both strategic decisions, tactics and practices, increasing business performance, fueling growth, streamlining operations, and minimizing risks.

Turning data into actionable insights

Business intelligence, also called business analytics, provides tools and techniques to turn large, disparate datasets into useful information. The term business intelligence encompasses several key techniques:

• Data mining: Uncovering hidden patterns, relationships, and trends within large datasets to gain actionable knowledge.
• Data analysis: Examining, cleaning, transforming, and modeling data to derive meaningful insights and inform decision-making.
• Performance benchmarking: Comparing an organization's key performance indicators against industry standards or competitors to identify strengths and weaknesses.
• Descriptive analytics: Summarizing past events and performance using data aggregation and mining to understand historical context.

BI in business operations

These tools use various data points from the organization to uncover insights and assist in making evidence-based decisions. When executed properly, it helps decision makers run a data-driven enterprise. This way it ensures everyone uses the same data and insights. By leveraging BI, businesses can:

• Identify trends: Spot emerging patterns and anticipating market shifts.
• Optimize operations: Streamline processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency.
• Enhance customer experience: Understand customer behavior and preferences to deliver personalized experiences.
• Mitigate risks: Identify potential problems and take proactive measures to address them.
• Drive innovation: Uncover new opportunities and drive strategic initiatives.

BI tools can help significantly improve performance. However, it is crucial that decision-makers have access to the same insights across the organization.

How BI works: two approaches

In the past, collecting data for business intelligence took a long time. This involved going through data from various departments and depending on manual work.

Modern BI tools have simplified the process. Robust data visualizations and cloud-based tools that allow multiple decision makers to access the same information simultaneously. Leveraging machine learning to big data has enabled decision-making based on even more powerful predictive analytics.

Let's review two approaches to making business decisions based on data analytics, the traditional linear journey and an agile process utilizing the latest advances in generative AI.

The traditional BI process: linear

In the past, business intelligence followed a rigid, linear path that often-hindered agility and responsiveness. Here's a breakdown of the typical workflow:

• Set requirements: Analyzing the business problem to determine the BI solution.
• Curate data: Collecting, cleaning, and transforming raw data for analysis.
• Build and test: Developing and testing the BI application or reporting tool by IT teams.
• Run reports or analyze: Using the BI tool to generate reports and conduct initial analysis.
• Dive deep with SMEs or data scientists: Bringing in specialists for complex analyses, often requiring more time and resources.
• Acquire more data: Collecting additional data to gain deeper insights, restarting the data wrangling cycle.

This straightforward approach sometimes causes delays and obstacles, especially when trying to understand complex data problems. Each stage relied on the completion of the one before it, and any obstacles could greatly delay the whole process.

Additionally, manual data collection could lead to errors. If you need more information, you may need to consult experts or data scientists. This could cause delays and require additional resources. To gain further insights, we may need to collect more data, which will lead back to the data collecting phase. This created a recurring issue that hindered flexibility and quick responses. Errors could also arise from inconsistent data or manual processes.

The modern BI process: agile and GenAI-powered

The rigid, linear BI process has been reimagined with a focus on agility, collaboration, and self-service capabilities. User-friendly tools with advanced analytics and AI make data accessible to everyone, regardless of their skill level. Using a GenAI enables a more dynamic and user-centric approach.

• Conversational BI: Natural language queries allow you to receive instant answers that fit your needs.
• Automated data preparation: AI-powered tools handle data cleaning, transformation, and enrichment.
• Accelerated development: Low-code/no-code tools and AI-driven recommendations expedite the creation of applications and dashboards.
• Natural language explanations: AI generates clear interpretations of insights, accessible to all users.
• Interactive exploration: Data exploration through follow-up questions and related insights.
• AI-powered expertise: Access to intelligent recommendations and domain knowledge.
• Continuous learning and scalability: The AI engine constantly learns and adapts, ensuring insights remain accurate as data volumes grow.

This simplified BI process enables faster decision-making and frees analysts to focus on higher-value tasks.

Our solutions

MicroStrategy

MicroStrategy ONE leverages large language models (LLMs) and generative AI to boost employee productivity and organizational efficiency through:

HyperIntelligence: Integrates data analytics into workflows effortlessly. HyperIntelligence follows users throughout their day to provide nuggets of intelligence wherever they work.

Embedded analytics: Embedded analytics infuses AI-powered analytics into any software, app, or portal. It allows users to instantly access data-driven insights from their everyday tools.

Cloud-powered analytics: Most BI tools are cloud-based, but not all are completely cloud-agnostic. MicroStrategy ONE allows companies to deploy the most cutting-edge AI tools using any major cloud provider.

These features help organizations use data effectively, promoting a culture of data-driven decision-making within the organization. MicroStrategy ONE aims to make data accessible and enjoyable for all users, encouraging informed decision-making through widespread use.

Jedox

The natural language processing capabilities of the AI Search Help Center and JedoxAI together with the powerful planning, budgeting, and forecasting functionalities of the AIssisted Planning Wizards enable users to swiftly navigate through complex databases and empower them with deeper understanding of their business, leading to smarter, more agile decision-making.

AIssisted planning: The AIssisted Planning Wizards are prebuilt components for integrated planning, budgeting, and forecasting. They offer greater accuracy in forecast revenue, demand, cashflows, and customer churn predictions, accelerating what-if analysis and supporting you in the process of decision-making.

AI Search Help Center: Powered by advanced AI technology, it communicates in natural language. To answer the question asked, the assistant looks through the knowledge base and suggests an easy-to-follow, step-by-step solution.

JedoxAI: By integrating Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities into Jedox Dynatables, JedoxAI provides a seamless, intuitive interaction with the Jedox platform, empowering financial analysts to easily navigate through complex datasets and thus make faster, more efficient data-driven decisions.

Jedox has been leading the way in artificial technology by seamlessly integrating unprecedented AI tools into its platform, providing organizations with unparalleled insights, efficiency, and precision.

If you would like to learn even more about business intelligence and how it can help you improve your business, contact us.

(sources: https://www.microstrategy.com/blog/everything-you-need-to-know-about-business-intelligence-bi; https://knowledgebase.jedox.com/jedox/ai/ai-overview.htm)