What Is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence is a technological process and architecture that transforms raw data into meaningful information, thus contributing to profitable business actions. In short, it is a suite of software and services designed to turn data into actionable insights.

Business intelligence provides detailed insights into your business by offering graphs, statistics, reports, and analyses that utilize historical data to support decisions based on facts rather than assumptions.

Thanks to business intelligence applications, limited resources can be managed more efficiently, opportunities and risks can be easily identified and evaluated, more valuable products and services can be created, and knowledge—considered a strategic resource—can be properly managed. As a result, the company’s competitive strength is enhanced.

Business intelligence is associated with many information systems, including OLAP data warehouses, data visualization tools, customer relationship management, geographic information systems, knowledge management, decision support and expert systems, and data mining.

Advantages of Using Business Intelligence

• With business intelligence, you can generate complex reports with a single click, saving time and resources and increasing efficiency.
• By emphasizing visual elements in processes, it increases visibility, making it easier to identify key areas.
• It eliminates complexity in business processes, enabling faster decision-making and keeping you informed of real-time developments.
• It helps you understand relationships between different data sets, giving you a competitive edge.
• By analyzing customer consumption habits, it helps guide your customer strategies in the right direction.

OLAP Cube and Business Intelligence

OLAP was developed to enable the use of stored data in decision-making through a relational modeling approach. It transforms databases from being mere data collections into structures that allow reporting and analysis based on user-defined parameters.

In OLAP applications, data is recorded across multiple dimensions, which can vary depending on business needs. For example, a simple record might include just a sales date and product type, while a more complex one might involve multiple dimensions such as date, location, product group, and sales team.

These structures, known as OLAP cubes or data cubes, take on a cube-like appearance as they are shaped by data depth and configured by the number of dimensions.

OLAP cubes help you build a data warehouse that meets all your business intelligence and reporting needs. Because they can aggregate and display large volumes of data, they allow you to analyze massive datasets in seconds.