Business Intelligence tools: Essential for the New Age Business Enterprises
The advent of technology into every industry has paved way for businesses to be reliant on software applications, computer networks and computer-based techniques. The corporate strategies, which are designed and developed with the aim of revenue and profit generation, depend on the correct analysis of business data. Business intelligence refers to this computer-based techniques used by the business houses and corporate sectors for identification, extraction and analyzing the data related to sales, finance or products.
The use of business intelligence tools was popularized in 1989 under the huge umbrella of Business Intelligence and included all concepts and methods used to improve the decision making process in the business organization. Based on facts and figures, these technologies provided the organizations with historical, current and predictive views of the business process. With the aid of technologies, processes and applications the project execution engineers analyze internal, structured & unstructured data and business processes.
Business intelligence, generally used to increase the business value of an organization, is used to measure performance metrics and benchmarking levels and completely manage the business process. Further, this is used in all business analytics- from data mining, statistical analysis, predictive analysis and business process modelling. The other applications where the business intelligence tools are used are enterprise reporting, collaboration platform for data sharing, knowledge management and regulatory compliance.
The e-commerce playing a major role in business expansion, a number of enterprises involved in creating e-commerce solutions for the business world have turned BI vendors. Because of the complicacies involved in selecting vendors in the BI industry, organizations also tend in to make one-time purchases of the business intelligence software zeroing on the best of the breed products. However, in the face of cut throat competition, gathering of accurate and timely information will not only help in understanding the clientele but also expedite the decision making process as well as undertake effective customer research.
BI analysts in collaboration with IT giants have developed software tools such as Associated Query Logic, Balanced Scorecard, Business Activity Monitoring, competitive analysis and business process re-engineering to bring together unstructured data from production metrics, sales statistics, attendance reports, customer attrition figures. By combining technologies that are stand-alone, proprietary and open source, these service providers offer the engineering and support personnel high performance business intelligence tools that create both robust as well as cost-effective solutions.