What are Business Intelligence Tools? Are they Important for Your Business?

BIRT, BOARD, IBM Cognos Intelligence, Jaspersoft, etc.; you might recall these words if aware about Business Intelligence Software. Working on BI tools is not easy and incorporating them into your organization requires time, efforts, and finance. What are Business Intelligence tools? Are they helpful for your company? Let's find out:

1.What are Business Intelligence Tools?

When you have a blooming enterprise, your company is loaded with data of customers, sales, products, internal processes, suppliers, partners, and more. This pool of data is useless unless it is converted into actionable information that helps to increase the business profit and revenue.

In simpler terms, BI tools are big data analytics software that aids people to transform data into useful information.

2. Let’s take an example:

Though BI tools have been around us for more than a decade, yet it was out of reach for SME. With constant changes and evolving technology, BI industry is now being accepted and used by businesses of all sizes and industries.

BI tools help an organization to receive, store, organize and analyze information that can help make better decisions. For instance, a hotel franchise uses BI tool to compare occupancy statistics and revenue generated by each room. A bank uses BI tool to find out who are the most profitable customers by comparing departmental data with the legal database.

3. Categories of BI Tools:

BI tools can be divided into four categories.

a) Reporting is the easiest form of BI tool that helps to create documents with valuable information. This can be any type of report like a weekly marketing campaign report.

b) The second category named Analysis is a crucial part of BI as it turns data into meaningful information.

c) Monitoring category covers BI tools that help users to monitor data and information in real-time or close to it. Prediction is the fourth category of BI tools, which covers Data Mining and Predictive Modeling. These tools are used to predict certain situations based on the available information and trends.

4. Do I need it?

It’s a complex question and requires a strong decisive power. It depends on various factors and characteristics like the type of business, available technology, men power, and business needs and so on.

Hence, it’s advisable to create BI business use cases that can help you pick the most suitable BI tool category for your enterprise. Your decision should not be based on the product’s maximum features but should be on the type of functions that your users will need most.

(Don’t know which features to include in your BI tool business use case? Stay tuned for our next blog.)

Few of the leading Business Intelligence Software are Microsoft SharePoint, Dundas BI, BOARD, BIRST, Halo and more. And tools like Jaspersoft, BIRT, Helical, Zatayu, Spagobi, etc are few of the best Open Source Business Intelligence Tools in India.