An effective Business Intelligence solution would endow users with literally numerous abilities. For example:”
- The ability to view data from multiple sources in a single view (e.g. seeing sales information correlated with shipping expenses and facility utility bills)
- The ability to quickly see summaries of data from different places (e.g. total payroll spent, along with the total sales, for a given time period)
- The ability to see data over time, comparing data from yesterday, last month, the past three quarters of the past 5 years, to see how things have changed over time
- The ability to drill down through successive layers of details to discover reasons causes ( e.g. to discover what particular product sales contributed the most to the sharp change in trend just noticed)
- The ability to ask “what if” questions and have answers generated based on historical data (e.g. for example, you might want to know if raising sales by 10% for a sustained period of time will necessitate a raise in utility costs or payroll expenses)
An organization that lacks any of these abilities would benefit from the use of a business intelligence tool.
These reporting and analytics abilities are incidentally what successful businesses exploit to address a number of key information management needs. The figure below shows a survey by QlikView that shows most occurring business drivers for BI.
These reporting and analytics abilities are incidentally what successful businesses exploit to address a number of key information management needs. The figure below shows a survey that shows the five most occurring reasons why most companies invest in business intelligence |
