DECEMBER 2018CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM8IN MY Viewith the amount of data and analytics we now have available, we are in a great position to fully understand every part of what makes our companies succeed. Advances in features, data mining tools, and mobile devices have made it possible for you to have access to key information when you need it, where you need it, and in the format, you need it. That is the power of Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence is not "nice to have" but is a requirement if you want to achieve your corporate goals effectively.The term Business intelligence (BI) refers to the tools, applications, infrastructure, and best practices that make it possible for you to access, analyze, and present information. You can use that information to inform critical decisions at every level of your business and optimize performance throughout. BI includes access to that information at any time and from any place (including mobile devices) so that you and your team can quickly act on it.Your company cannot remain agile, responsive, and competitive without BI. BI provides you with a competitive advantage over rivals and allows your company to quickly identify and act on new trends. Smart use of BI also helps you optimize internal processes, making you and your employees much more productive and efficient. BI systems can help companies identify problem areas and weaknesses before they become serious. It is an indispensable tool in business performance management.In BI systems, your company's key information can be accessed not just from a desktop computer connected to the company's internal network but from any authorized device. Reports and decisions no longer have to wait until your team is back at the office. With BI, end users can access what they need on their mobile device. A properly implemented BI system allows informed and accelerated decision-making at all levels of your company.The information contained in BI systems can be used for statistical analysis, visualizations, data mining, reports, and interactive analyses. A good BI system also includes location intelligence where the data can be mapped over geographical areas. Location intelligence provides stunning visuals with insightful perspectives on how data is related geographically and spatially. It also includes interactive reports that you can use to support advantageous features such as time series zooming, condition formatting, and OLAP analysis.A BI system is not just limited to new data and information. It can include your company's historical data, usually in the form of a data warehouse. This facilitates current, historical, and predictive views of your business operations. "What-if" analysis, used to predict the results of business decisions, is another key feature in quality BI system that you can put to use. A quality BI system can connect to multiple sources of data (new and historical) to provide seamless access to the data you need to run necessary analytics.Exceeding Corporate Goals with Business IntelligenceDANIEL M. HORTON, CIO, SALLYPORT GLOBALW
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