You may have heard about business intelligence before but do you know what this means? To help with that, a growing number of organizations are replacing traditional waterfall development with Agile BI and data warehousing approaches that use Agile software development techniques to break up BI projects into small chunks and deliver new functionality to business analysts on an incremental and iterative basis.

The drive to make it possible for just about anyone to get useful information out of business intelligence tools has given rise to self-service business intelligence, a category of BI tools aimed at abstracting away the need for IT intervention in generating reports.

A set of methodologies, processes, platforms, applications, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information used to enable more effective strategic, tactical and operational insights and decision-making.

In the age of information, business information and intelligence, if utilized strategically, has the power to propel a business far above their competitors as well as exponentially boost brand awareness, internal engagement, organizational efficiency, and profitability.

In many cases it’s the HR data that will be the last to get pulled into a data warehouse because of the sensitive nature of the data but once you start to manage this data effectively, you can see at a glance things like retention, absentees and where people are struggling and this information can prove invaluable when it comes to the effective management of your business.