Scope of Business Intelligence – An Industry scenario

Created On : Mar-11-2016 Author Author : Arunabh Amit
In recent decades or so Business Intelligence or popularly called BI has moved away from being just a technological strategy to a substantial form of business strategy for organizations and still continues to be one of the foremost spending priorities for them in today’s tough economic situations. Why? – Because Business Intelligence implementation leverages following.

  1. STRATEGIC :- They are comparatively low risk and low cost implementation.
  2. ROI :- They bring trusted high return on investment.
  3. EDGE :- It provides an edge & advancement to existing information investments.
  4. GUESSWORK ELIMINATION :- Business Intelligence provides relatively more accurate historical data, real time updates, amalgamation between departmental data stores, forecasting and trending, and even predictive 'what if?' analysis, eliminating the guesswork while making key business decisions.
  5. METRICS REPORT :- Important business report comprising business metric report and dashboards even extended to mobile devices giving various departments an online head start especially to marketing and sales personnel while providing crucial business information on the go.
  6. CONSUMER BEHAVIOR & INSIGHT :- It's one of the key usage of BI, since it helps companies to gain insight into what customers are buying or not buying which in turn can convert this information into some form of lead or additional revenue proposition and also helps retain continued & promising customers.
  7. CROSS SELLING & UP-SELLING FLING :- BI tools helps entities to build customer data and predictive models which sales personnel can use to cross-sell & up-sell products at considerate customers touch points.

Business Intelligence implementation in a strategical reference is expected to bring a direct positive impact on entities business performance, dynamically improving its ability to accomplish its goal by making ingenious & resourceful decisions at every level of service line from corporate strategy to business operations.

However the default risk associated with the BI initiatives can also turn out to be one of the worst mistakes an organization can afford. These risks can be one or more of following.

  1. Expecting BI tools to solves problems rather than using the BI to solve business problems.
  2. Thinking that BI tools will cover up for the lesser understanding of business.
  3. Giving a generalized solutions to all types of end users.
  4. Misunderstanding that BI is a one-size fits all type of a solution and that whether a thorough research been done to understand - It's goodness of fitting within the organization.
  5. A patchwork of disparate technologies can lead to redundant cost in deployment, training & maintenance and increased information inconsistencies. 

Business Intelligence Strategy - A key measure & indicator of success.

As per the latest predictions more than 35% of the top 5000 international companies cease to make any insightful decision about significant changes happening in their business world however it does not demean the power of BI tool set and it puts the onus on the actionable information & analysis.

In order to process information into real business change the enterprise BI strategy should must have answers to the following vital questions.

  1. Which business processes and persons leverages top impact on getting in line with the business objectives?
  2. What performance criteria have the highest impact on companies strategy & objectives?
  3. Types of information which has the highest impact on organization business objectives.
  4. Set of application & BI technologies that these persons need to deliver the higher growth rate to business objectives.

Rationalized BI standard – Essential part of BI implementation

An imperative part of a success oriented BI strategy includes rationalizing the existing BI tools and implementing effective BI standards. A large set of companies have already implemented standards corresponding to the business application environment, BI implementation is the next big thing for the organizations to obtain a greater return on their information asset and streamline cost effective business operations.

Putting BI standards in line with the business requirements leads to reduced number of supported BI tools in an organization which is essential for an uncluttered movement in the space of information analysis and additionally helps to reach to the most concrete decision making process.

  1. Lower software, support & administration costs.
  2. With fewer standards, there is scope of more reliable data for decision makers.
  3. Support of co-ordinated security and minimum unauthorized data access.
  4. featured timely answers to the business queries.
  5. Better risk management
These are the types of BI services typically offered in the industry.

  1. Cloud based BI :- The flexible BI for not the fixed infrastructure type of environment.
  2. Mobile BI :- The BI solutions on the move to tablets, phone, iPad while providing the access to the same data anywhere.
  3. Self Service BI :- The form of BI services, where the emphasis is on improved reporting, analysis and end user interfaces.
  4. BI Dashboard / Corporate performance dashboard :- The service of providing data visualization tools that exhibit the current status of metrics and key performance indicators (KPI's).
  5. Data Mining :- The service to aid the process of automatic and semi automatic analysis of large data set in huge volume to extract hidden interesting patterns namely unusual records detection (anomaly detection), grouping of data records (cluster analysis) and dependencies (association rule mining).
  6. Reporting :- The service that helps you keep track where your businesses are heading, such as - tracking day to day inventories, with the support of timely reports. These reports constitutes tactical, strategical, financial, production, Ad-hoc and other operational reports.
  7. Visual Analytics :- For the business process innovation and to bridge the gap between big data and data discovery, the need of a real time visual analytics as a business intelligence solutions effectively treated by R, Spark and other relevant software.


In part -2 we will consider the technology scenario of BI & its implementation perspective from the technological view point.
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