A Primer on Business Intelligence

Organizations seeking to gain competitive advantage in today's tough economic climate need to start seriously looking at Business Intelligence or BI software. In today's tough times, the need for real-time, actionable information is becoming important, specially when deciding where and how to allocate increasingly scarce resources such as employee time, capital, and equipment.

What is Business Intelligence or BI?
Business intelligence systems bring together data from disparate parts of the company in order to be able to turn that data into actionable information by providing analysis, reports, and predictions based on past performance. Some BI software let users aggregate data into a centralized "warehouse" of information. Others provide different "views" or ways to be able to look into the data to answers complex questions or to provide insights by surfacing patterns in the data. Some provide simple reports-in text or tabular form, while others are able to provide visual representations (such as charts and graphs) of complex or large data sets. Some condense or aggregate information into a more simple form--such as widgets or information dashboards to provide real-time, valuable information for decision makers.

In a February 2006 article BusinessWeek calls the executive dashboard the "killer app" for businesses of all sizes — a "must-have" application "that is beginning to change the nature of management, from an intuitive art into more of a science." Business Week, February 13, 2006

What can you do with Today's BI Tools?
With today's BI tools, you can easily draw information from a POS, ERP, CRM, HRIS, accounting, or just about any other system using a structured or relational database. You can link or aggregate that even with unstructured data from text files, documents, maps and webpages. With BI, you can transition from having to create static reports, charts or pivot tables in Excel or Access, and move to dynamic, ad hoc, shareable, and interactive reports. Where before these tools were mostly designed and priced for large businesses, choices and costs have now widened enough to make it affordable and accessible for small businesses.

Get Started with BI Today!
To help companies get a feel for the advantage that business intelligence brings to them, we offer a BI Pilot Program using Tableau. With this program, IT Group can help quickly deliver reports, dashboards, and analytics from a pilot (or Proof of Concept) BI application, using your data, in just a few days--even a few hours! These pilots are secure, and we can sign NDA agreements for sensitive engagements. All of this is available at no cost and no commitments. Contact us today!