Enterprise Analytics & Business Intelligence

Enterprise Analytics & Business Intelligence (BI) is the key to unlocking the full potential of information as a tool to enhance productivity and achieve strategic objectives and goals.

Business Analytics allows organizations to glean insight from historical data to help businesses be proactive and capitalize on market opportunities first, as well as to intervene in situations before they evolve into potential problems.  Analytics tools have been used primarily to deal with the structured data held within databases, which can tell you what happened.  However, if you need to know why it happened and what is likely to happen next, then you need to look at the next generation of analytics.  These tools help you rapidly gain insight from the vast amount of data, such as customer interaction data: unstructured information (not held in the neat rows and columns of databases) and presenting it in reports and visual views that are meaningful to business leaders.  Business analytics (along with data access and reporting) represents a subset of business intelligence (BI.)

Business intelligence software analyzes and reports on the volume of data organizations collect and stores, with the objective of driving better business decisions to improve the organization's performance.  BI often uses key performance indicators (KPI’s) to assess the present state of business and to prescribe a course of action.  Examples of KPI’s are lead conversion rate (in sales), promise-to-pay success rate (in collections) and inventory turnover (in inventory management.)  Businesses that face higher operational/credit risk loading, such as credit card companies and wealth management services, often make KPI-related data available weekly, and for some other applications it could be daily.  Business intelligence software provides timely reports, analysis, score-carding and dash-boarding that lets business leaders spot changes when they happen and make the right decisions at the right time.

Currently organizations are standardizing on business intelligence tools and smarter companies are adopting an integrated enterprise approach – by transforming business intelligence from a departmental to an enterprise-wide initiative.