What do you think of when you hear the term Business Intelligence?
Data? Numbers? Artificial Intelligence?
Well you’re on the right track. Kind of. The concept of Business Intelligence (abbreviated to BI) refers to the many tools and technologies that help you analyse business data. This could be from anything like trends to statistics.
In this article, we’re going to tackle the world of Business Intelligence in 2019 in more detail, through a concise cheat sheet you can take with you anywhere.
What does Business Intelligence Achieve?
In short, it helps you to make decisions backed by evidence, rather than intuition.
Depending on the framework of the program, Business Intelligence tools are designed to collect, analyse and display data over time. A BI tool doesn’t tell you what to do or what you need to do. But it tells you what has happened in your company in the past and what is happening right now.
By looking at past and current data, you can then decide on what to prioritise—be it improving customer experience by reducing the minutes it takes to action a request or optimising your workforce by deploying staff most efficiently.
What’s great about BI is its versatility and convenience, as tools often pool all this data into one main dashboard for you to use. Neat, right?
What About an Example?
Many enterprises use BI to collect large amounts of data. In fact, due to their sheer size, the tool plays a fundamental role in marketing, corporate and web development teams.
Rather than manually input numbers into an Excel spreadsheet, BI collects the data and conveys the information in a variety of ways, whether you like it as a graph, as a number or something else entirely.
For example, the team at WingArc Australia created our own BI platform called MotionBoard. Our clients use it to pool data collected through integrated software like sensors, wearables and other popular programs like Salesforce.
We customise our platform to the needs of our clients, whether it be monitoring staff performance, tracking locations or so much more. No matter how quickly your data evolves, MotionBoard can connect to and display the current position of your business with real-time updates. Such is the power of MotionBoard and at large, Business Intelligence.
What’s New for Business Intelligence in 2019?
The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) promises to revolutionise the world of business intelligence in 2019 and beyond. IoT devices, such as sensors, wearables, smartphones, tags, and so on are collecting more data than ever before. This has huge implications across every industry. For example:
- In the Retail world, stock, shipments, and even customers can be tracked like never before.
- Transportation and logistics companies can monitor driver behaviour, fleet activity, and much more to predict and reduce risks and accidents.
- Hospitality businesses can use location tracking to optimise their workforce, achieve efficiencies and improve the guest experience
Some Important Terms and Definitions to Remember:
Reports: Structured data, often created on an ad hoc basis by the BI tool.
Derived Analysis: Insights produced by interpreting the main dashboard of your BI platform. Think of it as the summary.
Behavioural Analytics: Interpreting the data to understand people’s intentions and predict future actions.
CRM: Denoting strategies and software that enable a company to organise and optimise its customer relations.
Lead generation: using a program or database to receive information that helps grow the business via sales revenue or finding new clients to sell to.
Application Programming Interface (API): The code that allows two software programs to work and communicate together seamlessly.
Analytics: the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. For example, our enterprise solution MotionBoard provides businesses with advanced analytics.
Advanced IoT Analytics
Explore our business intelligence solution for IoT: MotionBoard to see what advanced IoT analytics could do for you.
