What is Business Intelligence and how does it work?

Business Intelligence (BI) is a set of technologies, solutions, and applications that enable the transformation of data into useful information to support business management and decision-making analysis.

Essentially, Business Intelligence involves the use of tools for collecting, storing, analyzing, and visualizing data that can be incorporated into various applications to provide visual and intuitive research results.

The main objective of BI is to help decision-makers at different levels of the company to make strategic, operational, market, and product decisions more quickly and efficiently. It also helps maintain a competitive advantage over other competitors, as it can help improve company performance, identify market opportunities, optimize business processes, predict market changes, and much more.

What are the main technologies used in Business Intelligence?

As seen, Business Intelligence allows companies to transform data into meaningful information that can be used to make informed decisions and succeed in a competitive market. To do this, those who use BI use various technologies:

  • Interactive dashboards: display company-wide key metrics in real-time;
  • Data analysis: exploration of business data to identify trends, opportunities, and threats;
  • Reporting: generation of periodic reports on company performance based on specific metrics;
  • Data mining: use of machine learning techniques to identify hidden relationships among business data;
  • Predictive analytics: use of statistical models to predict future business trends;
  • Mobile Business Intelligence systems: access to business data from mobile devices;
  • Data integration: integration of business data from various sources to have a complete and consistent view of the data.

What does a Business Intelligence consultant do?

All these technologies need to be put together by someone who knows how to use and optimize them to achieve the results that a company needs. This is the Business Intelligence consultant: a qualified professional who helps organizations manage, develop, implement, and monitor procedures and strategies for data optimization.

They offer advice on how to best use company resources, data, and technologies to take advantage of data. A Business Intelligence consultant can also help companies adopt new business analytics practices, develop new business intelligence metrics, analyze data, and manage data analysis projects.