Businesses are recognizing the importance of finding their footing in this era of digital transformation. Business intelligence takes these applications, infrastructure, and tools to enable access to analytics that improve business decisions and performance.
Organizations want timely, well-informed decision-making to work within a scalable, standards-based BI solution, and getting these insights can send companies to a new level.
Here are some of the examples of business intelligence you may see business users adapt to.
Static Reporting
One of the prime business intelligence examples is called static reporting. This form of business intelligence reporting is used to provide companies of any size with a fixed view of data from operational data stores. Some reports are formatted and ready to print while others are available to download.
Static BI reports provide a view in time, typically coming from a live operational database within the application. This type of reporting is primarily used for reports where there is a predetermined layout such as invoices for a vendor in the manufacturing process.
With authoring and design tools, organizations are able to take database connectors and drivers for connecting to data sources and bring them into a user-friendly interface. Some business intelligence tools offer the ability to define custom data sources.
This can address a wide range of visualization types, including custom visualizations to construct reports and dashboards, a great way to track credit card use for companies like American Express. This affords support for expressions to control the look and behavior of data, including text elements, hyperlinks, and more.
Interactive Reporting
With managed interactive reporting, the end business user controls chart types, filters, and formatting. This type of business intelligence reporting is mainly used for dynamic lists and filtering results. Managed business intelligence reports help drive business performance with information sharing and predefined key performance indicators (KPIs).
These BI tools afford organizations a metadata layer to address their business goals. There are filters and security rules that allow for the safe combination of multiple data sources in a single view without ETL or data warehouse tools.
While these interactive reports provide detailed application information for tactical decisions, they may not be the go-to for the decision-makers in management. Executives may not need operational applications daily but instead snapshots of business performance and process tracking. A business intelligence performance dashboard measures short- and long-term trends.
This operations data is highly beneficial for monitoring social media to see where customer success is lying in the latest products introduced. BI data can create a statistical analysis that provides quicker summaries for higher-ups to get down to business.
Self-Service Reporting
Self-service reporting for operational applications allows business users to create custom BI reports for various operations outside of a packaged operational application. This can allow organizations across the business world to receive direct database access to an application to pull a CSV file or use a report design tool for more advanced requirements.
Users can also define an easy-to-understand layer of data points. This real-time availability is helpful in the airline industry to assess daily routes in conjunction with customer service to garner how well different departments are functioning.
With business intelligence, users can explore their data and spark deeper insight. For example, retailers might want to explore different data dimensions including wholesale unit costs, retail price, and product promotion data. With the right channels to real-time information, companies can get a better grip on their supply chain and maintain a competitive edge in the marketplace.
However, it’s important to have a BI program in place that takes any volume of data and makes sure that it can be turned around quickly to provide the detailed intelligence organizations need to get a leg up.
