What is Business Intelligence and How Does it Work?

Making the right decisions for your company is very important. And there are all kinds of tools that can help you, like Big Data. Another of the best known? Business Intelligence, or business intelligence.

For years, companies have been developing all kinds of protocols to effectively respond to customer needs. For this, they use Business Intelligence tools with which to improve their productivity and find individual solutions for each case.

What is Business Intelligence

You may wonder what Business Intelligence is. We can define it as the business tools with which to transform data into knowledge. For example, many platforms, such as online stores, have been collecting data about their customers, storing very valuable information.

Thanks to Business Intelligence tools, all this information can be interpreted to provide better solutions to our clients. And beware that you will not lack options to make the most of the data you have saved.

The first time this term was used was in the 1950s, when Hans Peter, a computer specialist who worked at IBM, used this term to define the idea of ​​promoting the development of a tool capable of analyzing real data with which offer more efficient solutions.

It may interest you: 5 Ways How Using Text Analytics Can Help Your Business

Business Intelligence, or BI, is totally dependent on the data you have saved. Without this information, there is no way to find formulas with which to offer better solutions individually, and for this reason, having a database is so important.

And this was one of the reasons why storage solutions experienced a boom in recent decades, offering all kinds of tools with which to apply BI with the best results.

How Business Intelligence works

To begin with, you need to have a series of requirements to be able to manage your company’s data through Business Intelligence. These are the main ones:

• Organization (ETL technology): it is in charge of extracting all the information and loading it into one of the Business Intelligence tools to homogenize all the data efficiently. With the information already in order, we move on to the next phase.
• Storage (Data Warehouse): when the information has been organized it must be stored in some way. And this is where the Storage or Data Warehouse comes in. We have multiple options, from physical format disks, to cloud solutions that will perfectly fulfill this function.
• Analysis (OLAP cubes): Finally we have the OLAP cubes (On-Line Analytical Processing), which are responsible for analyzing all the information provided to find solutions in real time with which to optimize time and provide the customer with superior service.

Regarding the type of Business Intelligence tools that you can find, say that there is a wide variety. For example, there are Apis that have been integrated into digital platforms and are responsible for providing all kinds of information in real-time.

Another of the most used tools is data management. These are responsible for managing all the information in a secure way to learn from the use and behavior of customers in order to provide the best solutions.

Finally, there are the reports where we can see in detail the performance of any digital tool that we use in our business.

As you may have seen, you will not be short of options when it comes to implementing Business Intelligence tools in your company with the aim of improving service by providing real-time solutions to make life easier for your customers. And we all know that a high level of satisfaction translates into increased sales.