What Can Business Intelligence Do For My Company?

CIOs are deluged with data. New streams of unstructured data are coming in from the cloud, social network sites, and mobile devices. Combine that with the structured data generated by enterprise applications, and the potential for insight into customers’ preferences, changing markets, and internal processes is enormous. The trick is unlocking that knowledge.

Analysis
More CIOs than ever are turning to business intelligence (BI) to make sense of all this data, according to recent surveys by research firm Gartner and CIO magazine. With BI, CIOs can pinpoint the data that will drive better business decisions and get it in the hands of the employees who can take action with it. BI is evolving to become more predictive, giving
CIOs greater insight into how the business is performing now and in the future. When done right, it can help organizations discover their strengths (and capitalize on them) and ferret out their weaknesses. It can even help organizations define new business opportunities.

BI generally includes a variety of applications that gather, store, analyze, and provide access to a company’s raw data.
The related functions they perform include forecasting, data visualization, data mining and more. Armed with these tools, organizations can use their data to guide their strategic decisions about products to sell, contracts to negotiate, customer service to improve, and markets to enter. BI can also help organizations identify internal business processes that can be made more efficient and less costly.

BI Capabilities
A BI platform should deliver 13 capabilities that support integration, information delivery, and analysis, according to Gartner. The research firm expects to see a greater demand for tools that go beyond information delivery to “enable easier and more intuitive analysis to discover new insights.” These key features are:

1. Shared BI infrastructure
2. Microsoft Office integration
3. Metadata management
4. Search-based BI
5. Development tools
6. Online analytical processing (OLAP)
7. Collaboration
8. Interactive visualization
9. Reporting
10. Predictive modeling and data mining
11. Dashboards
12.  Scorecards
13. Ad hoc query

Deployment Options
BI platforms have traditionally been installed on-premises, but like with other enterprise applications, alternative deployments are emerging as the BI market matures. Software as a Service (SaaS) and open source BI may make sense especially for smaller organizations that need a lower-cost option.

According to research published in March by Aberdeen Group, open source BI gives organizations a chance to explore the software and see if their internal IT staff has the skills necessary to take on a BI project, without making a capital investment. Aberdeen’s Open Source Business Intelligence report says that “open source also promotes a more iterative and incremental approach,” noting that this lets IT departments work at a pace that best suits the company.