Why is BI such a "hot topic" these days?
The combination of the software and hardware available today is better than it has ever been before, and now that most organisations have so much data they need something that can help make some sense of it all. Some argue that for 20 to 30 years organisations were just capturing and refining their data about their business and now finally they have decided that maybe they can use the data to manage their business more effectively."
But what the benefits of BI?
It is said that there are two camps in the business intelligence world, those that just create reports, and those that use the data to understand what is going on in a business. In the US, one of the biggest benefits is that by knowing what is going on you can keep yourself out of jail. But on a less drastic topic, you can use the data to get an early warning on problems, something that gives you time to fix the problem, plus of course you can educate mangers about your business.
What exactly does BI deliver
Analytics and BI delivers greater understanding, this knowledge delivering info on the factors that are really driving a businesses performance, in other words you look forwards instead of backwards.
What sort of businesses use BI tools
In hospitality, pricing and customer loyalty are the two major areas, the pricing of rooms or of airplane seats being early users of BI. In health care, a business is trying to work out who is likely to get a certain disease. Who is likely to get diabetes is a big issue in health care right now, so if you can do an analysis based on how active physically the person is, how much they weigh, their blood sugar levels, then you can actually come up with a fairly good assessment of how likely a particular individual is to come down with diabetes.
In the financial services sector, a question could be ’should I give this person a mortgage?’, or should I authorise a particular transaction on a credit card?’, all have become a very analytical decision. For retail, the question are different again, ‘what price should I charge' and ‘How many of each clothing type should I have in each store' etc are common questions.
Is BI all about the technology?
Very much no, the most important component in BI is quality data, and the good thing here is that today, most organisations have loads of it. Research.in the USA has shown the the number one factor is really the leadership dimension. In the end it is a question of how committed a company’s senior executives to fact-based and analytical decision-making rather than relying on gut feel or intuition.
What's the long term future for BI?
By the looks of it, SAP and Oracle are going to start embedding business intelligence into the business processes themselves, so that in the end they may well not distinguishable from other business software.
