What's business intelligence all about?
These days everyone seems to be talking about trends, analysis and doing business the intelligent way so what this business intelligence is all about? Is it common sense. business acumen or something more? Well, business intelligence is neither common sense or business acumen in the true spirit. Lets have a look at what it actually is.
Suppose you are a mechanic and you want to open up a repair shop for cars, where would you like to open it? Obviously wherever you get the access to maximum number of cars. So most likely you would find out the locality where the car ownership is highest and open your shop there. But then you find out that actually people are more likely to get their cars serviced/repaired around their work places. So you shift your focus from car ownership pattern of residential localities to the office areas around the city. Now these inputs like people are more likely to get their cars serviced near office is like an intelligence input. Hence#-Link-Snipped-# the word business intelligence.
There are a variety of tools available which help you arrive at such inferences. Typically all these tools have capabilities to capture and store data, then sort and report it based on certain considerations (e.g. find out all the people who have bought goods more than 1000 and have paid by credit card), some graphical representation capabilities etc. With the aid of these tools managers, dig out trends find out what are the latest patterns and then base their decisions on these facts or Business Intelligence inputs.
How can you and I use Business Intelligence? Now as an author on CE if I find out that out of the various topics that I write on more people are reading about Finance, then it makes more sense for me to write about Finance. In your case you would see a note below my article which would say, most people who read this story also read some other story(assuming that you are interested in this genre of articles and you are like the others who read this article earlier). This again is a Business Intelligence input which may help you make a better decision of reading a blog which would interest you more.
Thus, simply put, Business intelligence is all about making sense out of the data and generating fact based pointers for decision makers to help take a better decision. On a philosophical note, all said and done, at the end of the day though, every decision you make is your decision and people/tools can just help you take an informed decision.
Suppose you are a mechanic and you want to open up a repair shop for cars, where would you like to open it? Obviously wherever you get the access to maximum number of cars. So most likely you would find out the locality where the car ownership is highest and open your shop there. But then you find out that actually people are more likely to get their cars serviced/repaired around their work places. So you shift your focus from car ownership pattern of residential localities to the office areas around the city. Now these inputs like people are more likely to get their cars serviced near office is like an intelligence input. Hence#-Link-Snipped-# the word business intelligence.
There are a variety of tools available which help you arrive at such inferences. Typically all these tools have capabilities to capture and store data, then sort and report it based on certain considerations (e.g. find out all the people who have bought goods more than 1000 and have paid by credit card), some graphical representation capabilities etc. With the aid of these tools managers, dig out trends find out what are the latest patterns and then base their decisions on these facts or Business Intelligence inputs.
How can you and I use Business Intelligence? Now as an author on CE if I find out that out of the various topics that I write on more people are reading about Finance, then it makes more sense for me to write about Finance. In your case you would see a note below my article which would say, most people who read this story also read some other story(assuming that you are interested in this genre of articles and you are like the others who read this article earlier). This again is a Business Intelligence input which may help you make a better decision of reading a blog which would interest you more.
Thus, simply put, Business intelligence is all about making sense out of the data and generating fact based pointers for decision makers to help take a better decision. On a philosophical note, all said and done, at the end of the day though, every decision you make is your decision and people/tools can just help you take an informed decision.
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