Importance of Business Intelligence Tools

23.01.2012 | Author: jackleen | Posted in Technology
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Companies and organizations as they do business collect large amount of data. Known as the corporate data, it consists of important information dealing with business operations, current business trends, business strategies of their competitors, latest events and fads and so on. This data needs to be consolidated for future reference especially when companies and organizations want to plan strategically their business processes. Moreover, interpretation and analysis of this data can provide valuable insights into their business operations. This in turn would help to identify areas that need improvement, achieve operational efficiency, increase sales, reduce costs, identify new business opportunities and make powerful business decisions.

Business intelligence is the identification and analysis of company’s disparate data to extract meaningful information for more effective decision-making. Forrester Research defines Business Intelligence as “a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information used to enable more effective strategic, tactical, and operational insights and decision-making.”

However, since mountains of data are developed and collected, companies and organizations need effective tools to manage data efficiently. With the volume of data growing at an unprecedented rate, what is required are effective tools that do more than just organize and deliver information. With the help of eminent market players who have been ranked among the best product development companies, organizations can develop tools that can analyze and interpret data quickly and provide them the much-needed competitive advantage. Let us look at some of the important functions of business intelligence tools.

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
OLAP is a category of software product development tools that helps to selectively extract information from multidimensional data and view it from multiple perspectives. It comprises of three important operations and they are consolidation, drill-down, and slicing and dicing.

Data Mining
It is the process of extracting hidden information from large mountains of data and delivering it in a way that is comprehensible and understandable. Data mining tools help to forecast future trends.

Process Mining
It is the process of extracting information from event logs to analyze the processes and thereby identify the problem areas. Process mining provides the necessary tools and techniques to extract process, control, data, organizational, and social structures from event logs.

Analytics
It is the process of analyzing the business data for developing recommendations to improve business performance in the future.

Complex Event Processing
It is the process of identifying the most relevant events from the cloud of events happening in a company or organization; analyze the impact or effect of those events so that the most appropriate action can be taken at the right time.

Predictive Analytics
As the name suggests, it is the process of analyzing current and historical facts to provide forecast on future events.

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