What Are Business Intelligence (BI) Tools?
By Gökçe Ünaç
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Nowadays, information is one of the most valuable commodities. Intelligent use and management of Big Data in decision-making create strength and opportunity for the organization. In today’s world, the business environment is highly competitive and dynamic. Due to its environment, businesses need to interpret the data in a short time. Business intelligence tools are needed in this dynamic environment to manage massive data. Using business intelligence tools effectively creates a competitive advantage for the organization. Starting from the late 20th century, due to globalization and information Technologies, society has been trans- forming into a society based on information and knowledge, from a society based on agriculture and industry. With the rise of the value of information and knowledge, intangible goods became more important than before.
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Since the digital revolution, BI has been evolving rapidly. Combining the data with analytical tools, business intelligence presents complex information to the decision-makers of the organization in an interpretable form. It transforms massive amounts of data into useful sources, assisting operational and strategic decision-making. Business intelligence converts the raw data to information and information to knowledge. It is useful, especially for companies that have to manage a big quantity of data where the data is more complex and harder to interpret
Business Intelligence tools are types of application software, designed to analyze, transform, and report data. They collect and process large amounts of unstructured data from internal and external systems. BI tools generally read the data that has been stored in past, usually through a data mart, or data warehouse, to help the analysis and presentation of the data. It is a natural outgrowth of a series of previous systems designed to help the decision-making process. BI is also used for estimating future performance based on historical data, and for “what if” analysis. Some of the most important Business Intelligence tools can be stated as dashboards, visualization, reporting, data mining, and OLAP (online analytical processing). Dashboards are visual summaries of data that show a glance understanding of data.
OLAP performs fast analysis in large dimensions of data from data warehouses or data marts, and data mining extracts consumer information from the database. After the data is prepared with the help of these tools, it is used to create reports and data visualizations. Using the results enables both employees and managers to accelerate and advance the decision-making process, discover new revenue potentials, identify new business opportunities, analyze market trends, and increase operational efficiency. Besides bringing all the relevant data together, BI tools also eliminate manual tasks and reduce business costs by significant amounts. The Business Intelligence software market is highly competitive, including many proprietary products such as Tableau Software, Power BI, Domo, and open source products like R, and BIRT Project. This competitive- ness in the market forces the products to be innovative, and dynamic.
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A business intelligence system is structured from different components in which one step follows another. The heterogeneous data is stored in various sources, and they need to be gathered and integrated. With the help of the tool called ETL, extract, transform, and load, the data is extracted from different sources and stored in data warehouses and data marts. Then using mathematical models, data is transformed into information and knowledge with the process called data mining. Afterward, with the optimization process, a large number of alternatives are evaluated, and the best solution among those alternatives is determined. As the last step, during the decision process, the decision maker evaluates also the unstructured and informal information and makes the final decision. In today’s business environment the use of Information Technologies is necessary to deliver actionable information to the decision-makers. Business intelligence is crucial to gather, store, and analyze the data for the management of the company.
