Business intelligence is a broad umbrella phrase that encompasses all the tools, techniques, systems, and procedures used by businesses to identify, understand, and obtain key business data. Today, companies use various types of business intelligence (BI) tools to monitor their activities, derive reliable commercial information from internal databases, and improve their overall performance. The need for business intelligence professionals is growing because of the rapidly changing business environment. Businesses now use business intelligence tools to pinpoint, analyze, and extract useful insights from the massive amounts of information they store in the form of reports and product portfolios.
One of the most important facets of business intelligence is the application of tools that make it possible for users to visualize and manage their data. This includes developing effective data visualization tools, implementing dashboards, visualizations, and intelligence feeds. However, before this aspect of business intelligence can be fully utilized, it is essential to have an understanding of what it really is and how it works. In this article, we will take a brief look at business intelligence through the prism of data visualization.
Business intelligence visualizations are typically visual summaries or “cards” that provide key insights through a series of visual elements. These insights represent the core elements of business intelligence. This includes both descriptive and predictive components of business information, namely: marketing, research & development, business operations, business strategy, advertising, sales, distribution, etc. These visual elements provide a key means of business operations support, which includes the development and implementation of predictive business intelligence models and dashboards.
These predictive dashboards are then used by business intelligence analysts to examine and evaluate the various factors that are influencing business decisions. They allow analysts to apply their knowledge to real-time decisions by allowing them to create charts and graphs that can better reflect and compare potential results with existing and new raw data sets. Business intelligence analysts can then make the best interpretations of these critical inputs and use the resulting information to better understand and predict future business results. While previous methods relied on complex calculations and complex analysis, business data visualization makes decision-making easier by allowing analysts to quickly analyze raw data in a visual format.
Business intelligence software such as business intelligence applications (BIAs) and data warehouses provide the means by which business intelligence analysts can leverage data to analyze and make more informed decisions. Data visualizations in these types of applications can present key business data in a highly compelling and effective format. The key is for the analyst to understand the importance of these visualizations, how to interpret them, how to visualize them, and how to compare them to other data sets and dashboards. While many business intelligence software tools already provide some or all of these capabilities, business intelligence software visualizations can often be even more powerful and helpful. To this end, business intelligence application developers frequently integrate visualization tools into their BIS applications.
Data visualizations are an important component of business intelligence programs, and they have an important place in most business intelligence and business decision making tools. It can be very challenging, however, for analysts to understand how to make decisions based on visual data without having a full understanding of the underlying meaning. It is therefore important that business intelligence analysts not only understand the benefits of data visualizations, but also how to properly apply them. This understanding will lead to a deeper understanding of business intelligence and the ability to make better business decisions.