Business Intelligence: What is it and for whom?

What is Business Intelligence?

Have you heard following news recently:

Target (retail giant) figured out a teen girl was pregnant before her  father did!

Credit Card companies have fraud detection systems which can find fraudulent transactions!

Surprised? Do you know what is behind these amazing, futuristic sounding news? It is data Analytics and Business Intelligence(BI). It is possible to analyze huge data using analytic tools to bring out useful information and  find patterns. Currently there is a deluge of data generated by  customer relationship management,marketing, finance, supply chain management and  human resource management systems .Unorganized, this data is nothing but a clutter, however when it is transformed and analyzed, it can give a very clear picture of business. BI is becoming necessary for understanding business, finding business trends, patterns and setting standardized indicators (KPI) to determine health of any organization.

For whom this blog is meant for?

This blog will help students, working professionals in IT, who have passion for analyzing data, generating business insights and basically who want to understand the meaning of data which is being created by the IT applications. It will be especially helpful to my IT friends who are interested in business side of the industry.

I have spent considerable amount of time working for IT companies, working as business analyst. However I was always more interested to go towards the business side without losing my technical knowledge which I had gained so far. Hence I decided to go towards business intelligence (BI) and it has been a satisfying experience. This blog will help aspirational BI business analysts through tutorials, discussing practical examples of using BI in solving business problems, current scenario of BI in the industry and future trend. Your one good insight can lead to profit or savings in tune of million dollars for a big organization.

How BI Business Analysis is different from conventional BA?

The concept of Business Intelligence Business Analysis is still new. Generally people confuse it with Business analysis for IT which is involved in requirement gathering from client to convert business requirement to technical requirements. IT Business Analysis is generally involved in creating Business requirement documents (BRD), Functional requirement documents (FRD) for developers(coders) to create IT applications. It is bent more towards IT side of the industry, helping in development of applications, which requires extensive technical knowledge but relatively less understanding of business.

However, BI business analyst comes into picture when these applications are successfully put into place, generating day to day data. This data contains lot of hidden information, which can be used by the companies to understand how their business is doing. They can analyze the data to understand opportunities, strength, weakness, and future trends for the companies. This is where business intelligence comes into play.

Importance of BI

In the business industry I have seen managers struggling with data analysis tools because they are technologically challenged. They are handicapped because of limited knowledge in SQL, Excel, SAS etc. IT associates can easily learn these BI tools (which I will discuss in my future blogs), perform the analysis and derive insights which are very important for the business. 

BI talent pool is in high demand and according to  McKinsey, there will be a shortfall of 1.5 million BI analysts by 2018. BI calling you.

Resources:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-23/why-b-schools-should-teach-business-intelligence