Business Intelligence

By Author: FACTS Computer Software House
Total Articles: 24
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Business Intelligence basically represents the tools and systems that play a key role in the strategic planning process of the corporation. These systems allow a company to gather, store, access and analyze corporate data to aid in decision-making.

Generally these systems illustrate business intelligence in the areas of customer profiling, customer support, market research, market segmentation, product profitability, statistical analysis, and inventory and distribution analysis.

Most companies collect a large amount of data from their business operations. To keep track of that information, a business would need to use a wide range of software programs, such as Excel, Access and different database applications for various departments throughout their organization.

It is a software which is designed for extracting important data from an organization's raw data to reveal insights to help making business faster and more accurate decisions. The software typically integrates data from across the enterprise and provides end-users with self-service reporting and analysis. They basically use a number of analytics ...
... features including statistics, data and text mining and predictive analytics to reveal patterns and turn information into insights.

Features

Intuitive Web-based Interface
In the past, reporting and business intelligence tools were only available as client/server implementations. This put a tremendous strain on IT staff, who had to install and maintain software on end-user desktops. Additionally, this approach made business intelligence available to only a small percentage of the company’s information consumers. The majority of business intelligence vendors provide Web-based access to corporate data to make information readily available to more users and user types, allowing for access anytime, anywhere.

Ad Hoc Reporting
First generation business intelligence offerings were highly complex in nature. As a result, only the most technical business professionals – mostly analysts and power users – could effectively use them. Other workers had to continue to rely on IT staff to collect, aggregate, and format data in order to get the reports they needed. But today’s business intelligence solutions shield the end-users from all the technical complexities associated with reporting and analysis. Powerful yet simple and user-friendly ad hoc reporting capabilities make it easy for workers at all levels, including executives and frontline staff members, to quickly build and run their own reports any time they need them.

Flexible Formatting Options
Different users need their information to be presented in different ways. That’s why most business intelligence tools allow users to output their reports as Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, Web pages, Adobe PDF files, and a wide variety of other formats.