BIRT, BOARD, IBM Cognos
Intelligence, Jaspersoft, etc.; you might recall these words if aware about Business
Intelligence Software. Working on BI tools is not easy and incorporating
them into your organization requires time, efforts, and finance. What are
Business Intelligence tools? Are they helpful for your company? Let's find out:
1.What
are Business Intelligence Tools?
When you have a blooming
enterprise, your company is loaded with data of customers, sales, products,
internal processes, suppliers, partners, and more. This pool of data is useless
unless it is converted into actionable information that helps to increase the
business profit and revenue.
In simpler terms, BI tools
are big data analytics software that aids people to
transform data into useful information.
2. Let’s
take an example:
Though BI tools have been
around us for more than a decade, yet it was out of reach for SME. With
constant changes and evolving technology, BI industry is now being accepted and
used by businesses of all sizes and industries.
BI tools help an
organization to receive, store, organize and analyze information that can help
make better decisions. For instance, a hotel franchise uses BI tool to compare
occupancy statistics and revenue generated by each room. A bank uses BI tool to
find out who are the most profitable customers by comparing departmental data
with the legal database.
3. Categories
of BI Tools:
BI tools can be divided
into four categories.
a) Reporting is the
easiest form of BI tool that helps to create documents with valuable
information. This can be any type of report like a weekly marketing campaign
report.
b) The second category
named Analysis is a crucial part of BI as it turns data into meaningful
information.
c) Monitoring category
covers BI tools that help users to monitor data and information in real-time or
close to it. Prediction is the fourth category of BI tools, which covers Data
Mining and Predictive Modeling. These tools are used to predict certain
situations based on the available information and trends.
4. Do
I need it?
It’s a complex question and
requires a strong decisive power. It depends on various factors and
characteristics like the type of business, available technology, men power, and
business needs and so on.
Hence, it’s advisable to create BI
business use cases that can help you pick the most suitable BI tool category
for your enterprise. Your decision should not be based on the product’s maximum
features but should be on the type of functions that your users will need most.
(Don’t know which features to
include in your BI tool business use case? Stay tuned for our next blog.)
Few of the leading Business
Intelligence Software are Microsoft SharePoint, Dundas BI, BOARD,
BIRST, Halo and more. And tools like Jaspersoft, BIRT, Helical, Zatayu,
Spagobi, etc are few of the best Open Source Business Intelligence Tools in India.
