101: Business intelligence
Business intelligence can, for many of us, come under the catch-all umbrella of analytics. But understanding the difference between them is key in putting both to work to improve your company – and one doesn’t work without the other. Experts here weigh in on BI, and how it works with analytics to support better business decisions.
BI doesn’t predict the future. According to CIO.com, company leaders must understand the difference between BI and business analytics. BI is what is happening now: What sales prospects are in the pipeline, or the number of members lost in the current month. Business analytics, meanwhile, is predictive. “BI aims to deliver straightforward snapshots of the current state of affairs to business managers,” says a CIO article by Mary K. Pratt and Josh Fruhlinger. “BI is that it should be easy for relatively non-technical end users to understand, and even to dive into the data and create new reports.”
Good change is based on accurate BI. The fanciest data-analytics software will be useless without the correct information, according to a Forbes article by Christian Ofori-Boateng. “The right tool will help you illustrate data in a meaningful way, and then distribute this information to the right people at the right time,” he writes. Problems should be clearly defined and solved one at a time, he adds, which is a better method with which to rally your team around their solutions.
Be strategic in BI planning. First, company leaders should decide what they want to fix, sourcing data before and not after that point, writes Jeff Pruitt at Inc.com. This saves time and aggravation. “Having a strategy helps to filter down the amount of data you’ll have to sort through and is a more accessible option for companies wanting to embark on BI but not able to dive all-in right off the bat,” such as smaller firms, he says.
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