Business Intelligence as a Career Option?

Business intelligence is an umbrella term, which includes infrastructure, applications, tools and best practices that enable analytics of data and information in order to improve and optimize decision making and managing corporate performance. There are a lot of tools and technologies which are built on this concept.

BI as a Discipline

Business Intelligence is made up of several related activities, which includes Data mining, Online analytical processing, Reporting, and Querying.

Why Companies Prefer to use BI?

• Helps improve predictive mechanism through decision making
• Reduces cost
• Helps identify new business opportunities

In the modern world, business operations are getting more complex with each passing day, hence there is little time for research and innovation. We find bigger enterprises rushing towards competition which ultimately requires a lot of meaningful insights. However, due to increase in untidy data, it becomes very difficult to analyze in real time. That is when firms look out desperately for technologies which can help them analyze as well as predict the market trends, by mere simple click. Business intelligence serves the above purpose.

Each Year, Poor Data Quality and Conventional Analytics leads to loss of Billions

These discrepancies cause the companies to waste their effort and time that are of no value. Business intelligence technologies also help the companies refine slice as well as dice the data in order to find insightful patterns. Business intelligence started as a vague concept but now it has gained very good momentum since the evolution of the big data.

Business intelligence helps companies to organize and access their information in order to make better business decisions.

A business intelligence professional is required to be proficient in –

Relational Databases: one needs to understand as to how relational databases work. There are limits as to what you can achieve by working towards the table scheme provided by the database developer.

Basic Programming Skills: Reporting software has an underlying scripting language as to how excel has macros. It is good to have some basic understanding of programming.

SQL: Knowledge of SQL is preferred although it is not essential. Learning basics of SQL would be better before embarking BI career.

Knowledge of Reporting Software: For reporting software, it is significant that an individual understands the theory behind rather having an intimate knowledge of all software.

Analysis Skills: In IT industry, Business intelligence is different from what is generally considered analysis. There are no books or resources to explain about Business Intelligence, as it is new and it is science.

Since the initial days, when this concept was introduced numerous companies have entered this field, most of them were top tech players like SAS, IBM, and SAP. As per the recent survey conducted by Gartner, the small firms like Tableau and Qlikview are trending, nowadays with richer visualization features.

How is BI Making a Difference?

BI and data analytics have changed the way businesses used to operate initially with the help of strong visualization techniques that helps instantly look into the trends and facts to make better decisions in real time.

Valuable insights come in handy. Business intelligence has brought numerous options to summarize and visualize the information in a meaningful way streamlining the business decisions with the opportunities prevailing in the market.

Starting from customer behavior patterns to the political and environmental factors. Business intelligence helps in enlightening various aspects to give you a clearer view.

Making Business Operations Smarter: By integrating business intelligence into the business process, it allows to proceed in the profitable directions rather than basing your decisions on vague theoretical grounds. We find the above technologies not only allow to accumulate the information but share it across various departments for the purpose of coordination and efficiency improvement.

Visibility into the Data: Business Intelligence offers a tool, which has a greater visibility to the facts hidden under the complex and cluttered web of data. BI Systems drills deep into the data in order to find the significant trends that can positively influence the company operations.

Offers Competitive Edge: Businesses can survive cut-throat competition, by having a good BI technology. It offers you a great leverage, the information helps a company to stand out in the crowd.