The last decade has produced countless improvements in business technology providing an ever expanding mountain of data. From ERP and CRM applications to the newer cloud based and social network data-streams, companies need help in making sense of it all. After all, data can only guide your company in the right direction if it is presented in the right context.

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence (or BI) provides this capability through the deployment of several applications that gather, store, analyze and provide appropriate reporting on a company’s data. Now more than ever before CEO’s are turning BI solutions to help them organize their data into useable information. What’s more, Business Intelligence has evolved in the last several years, now offering more predictive capabilities helping companies foresee future opportunities for success, as well as discover strengths and weaknesses.

Whether you choose to integrate the BI tools on-site or access them through the cloud, be sure that any you chose have the following capabilities¹:

• Business Reporting
• Dashboards
• Ad Hoc Query
• Interactive Visualization
• Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
• Microsoft Office Integration
• Scorecards
• Development Tools
• BI Infrastructure
• Search-based BI
• Collaboration
• Metadata Management
• Predictive Modeling and Data Mining

Giving employees access to real-time data through the use of BI tools will help you increase productivity and ongoing effectiveness throughout your organization. Turning data into useable information will provide the insight you need to make business decisions based on facts, rather than a ‘gut-feel’ increasing the likelihood of your company’s future success.

Free Business Intelligence Webinar: The Data Driven Organziation. Learn more.

¹Gartner Research