The term Business Intelligence (BI) is so pervasive in today’s data-intensive lexicon that it’s a challenge to know just what to make of it. If you add in all the new trendy terminology such as business process management (BPM), data mining, data warehousing, business process automation, decision support systems, query and reporting systems, enterprise performance management, executive information systems (EIS), business activity monitoring (BAM), modeling and visualization, and so forth, your head can start spinning off its axis.
“BI is neither a product nor a system. It is an umbrella term that combines architectures, applications, and databases. It enables the real-time, interactive access, analysis, and manipulation of information, which provides the business community with easy access to business data. BI analyzes historical data—the data businesses generate through transactions or by other kinds of business activities—and helps businesses by analyzing the past and present business situations and performances. By giving this valuable insight, BI helps decision-makers make more informed decisions and supplies end-users with critical business information on their customers or partners, including information on behaviors and trends.” Mukhles Zaman
Maybe he meant bringing your organization, your management and your information systems together to enhance how you do business, how you fufil your purpose. So with this modest objective of bringing these pieces together, small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) must filter through the morass of hype emanating from many BI application vendors who claim that they should invest in higher-priced, industrial-strength BI solutions to achieve their goals.
Given that virtually all SMBs can benefit from BI tools, the real question is how much of this technology constitutes a good investment of time and energy? Most of the industrial-strength, BI-related tools cater to larger enterprises whose business structures are highly complex and whose budgets can accommodate the lofty implementation expenditures.
While many vendors would like you to think that their pricey, high-end solutions are absolutely necessary for the SMB sector as well, our research indicates otherwise. Based on the size of your company and budgetary constraints, your goal is to determine what BI tools you really need to drill down and extract the key performance data that will make your company more efficient and profitable.
