Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) is a term for methods and solutions that gather key information about business processes and make it available for decision-makers and users. It is essential for any company to know its core business and which factors affect the outcome of daily operation. Processes are not defined, static entities, but rather dynamic operations that must be continuously monitored and adjusted in line with changes and external occurences.

As complexity increases in line with the opportunities and capacity of IT tools in general, the same high standards apply to the data collection and meta-analysis needed to provide an adequate overview. This is where BI solutions come into their own and allow control, efficiency, optimization and understanding of data and functionality beyond manual capabilities.

Business Intelligence’s 3 phases:

Data collection
Analysis
Reporting

Data collection in this context means accessing data that is already transferred in the solution’s existing interfaces, so there’s a short way from existing integration solutions to the beginning of a necessary process overview via BI solutions.

Analysis can consist of anything from extracting KPI information or averaging data over time, to advanced formulas and algorithms for drill-downs.

Reporting is producing simpler representations of the data, like graphs and charts for easy comparison of related data, and publishing these in a way that makes information easily accessible to the appropriate person.