Business Intelligence is the practice with leveraging data analytics to examine and represent data in any corporate environment. This practice is considered essential for companies that want to ensure their business leaders, chief executives, as well as managers are empowered and equipped to make well-rounded decisions on how to manage the company’s affairs. It represents a strategy for extracting insights from the tons of data that businesses generate on a daily basis, ultimately providing direction in growing the business, returns, and revenue.

The primary purpose of Business Intelligence is to provide deep insights into a business by analyzing past performance and producing easy-to-digest reports and analysis that inform business strategy for long-lasting business stability. Any business firm can implement this approach by leveraging the various methodologies, Business Intelligence tools, and platforms. Typically, a Business Intelligence (BI) platform consumes information from sources that are internal and external to the organization and allows for prompt examination and visualization for strategic decision making.

Why Is Business Intelligence Important?

Business Intelligence enables companies to make better decisions by analyzing current and past data generated by their business. To make the enterprise run faster and more effectively, BI provides performance and competitor benchmarks. Besides, to boost sales or revenue, BI enables industry patterns or trends to be spotted more rapidly. Beyond that, if used efficiently, appropriate analysis via BI impacts all aspects of the business from supply chain to sales, operations to quality assurance (QA).

Business Intelligence can help establishments make more informed, data-driven decisions in the following ways:

  • Identify strategies that result in increased profit
  • Monitor customer actions
  • Draw comparisons with rivals
  • Assess productivity
  • Promote efficient practices
  • Anticipate potential problems
  • Predict characteristics of future market environments


Business Intelligence tools
To analyze, monitor and evaluate trends over time, Business Intelligence tools have been developed that consume tons of data from disparate sources, combines them and produces the desired insights. Businesses today utilize many software packages to get the job done and so BI tools leverage sophisticated technologies such as SQL, SSH to perform the extraction and manipulation of the data. Additionally, these tools produce visually rich and interactive reports that leaders in the organization can easily understand.

Future of Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence continues to grow, transform and integrate with other disciplines. According to Howson, Gartner considers a transitional period of innovation on the horizon, which the research firm calls “enhanced analytics,” where artificial intelligence is built into the software and directs users to the information on their questions. “It’s going to be BI and analytics, and it’s going to be clever,” she added. Furthermore, according to Gorman, the variations used in these software systems would independently make each feature more productive and more useful for the corporate executives who use them. For example, if somebody looks at the data from last year’s revenues, which is BI, they will also get estimates of next year’s revenues, which is business analytics, and then add a what-if potential to that: the system can now make more valuable recommendations and decisions.


In particular, the Magic Quadrant report by Gartner forecasts that by 2020, companies that give “users access to a curated collection of data from various sources will consider multiple times the market cash flow in insights than those who do not.”

Howson contributes: “There is a demand for reportage, but it is not sufficient to report separately.” If you’re just reporting, you’re so late. Unless you are producing wise and evolutionary reporting, consider yourself far behind.


Final word
Business Intelligence enables organizations develop deep insights into the performance of every aspect of their operations. In addition, expenses such as inventory control, accounting, and customer support can be found in the back office. BI should also emphasize which projects are the most expensive and have an effect on your wages. Finally, it will help you see which procedures are explicitly linked to the level of income and how they influence your company. For cost savings and efficiency enhancements, the executive management team should use business intelligence to get an insight. Moreover, BI tools can be used to track progress and make changes as needed continuously.

Adaptive BIBO Innnovations’ experts are experienced in working with teams to extract valuable insights from data the organizations generate. If you are interested in equipping and empowering your C-suite, leadership and managers with the tools and insights required to take your business to the next level, let’s chat.