Organizations want timely, well-informed decision-making, in operational settings and in the corner office—no matter what their mix of platforms, applications, or infrastructure environments. From the point of view of information technology, we can say that BI is a set of methodologies, applications and technologies that allow a business to the group and transform the data obtained from structured information systems to do analysis and information generation and improving the process decision-making of the business.
Organisations need to react to the information they’re been given as this is where the value is added, this is what we refer to as BI culture, creating the mindset within the organisation to ensure people are getting the best out the business intelligence solutions to ensure the business is able to move forward.
With the massive volumes of data generated by companies today, integrating BI into Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) technologies, enables this data can effectively release intelligence about the company’s internal and external operations.
Once a report is developed it must be run to collect, manipulate and display the requested data, and the results communicated to the people who need to view it. This can be done as a manual process, running the report and then either saving it to a suitably accessible drive, or emailing to the intended recipients.
For example, some monitor blogs, social media, and newspaper articles to present their companies with critical information about consumer sentiment, while another alum may work for the military and use business intelligence software to identify and avoid potential threats.