Business Intelligence: Business is no longer business without BI

In today’s highly competitive business environment, obtaining the necessary data in a short time and in the most convenient form is an essential part.

Maksym Prokhorov, founder and managing partner PM PARTNERS

This allows us to quickly navigate changes and make optimal decisions. Business Intelligence (BI) helps in this case. Which are these systems and which are the characteristics of these systems, let us find out in specific examples.

Simply about the complicated

In a simplified version, one can explain how the BI-system works in such a way: the data source is connected to the system, than, the information arrives in a single storage, where it is processed. The result of this whole process are reports.

Let us look at the main challenges that BI-systems are facing. In particular, these include:

• Collection of data from different sources, structuring, storage;
• Analysis of significant amounts of information;
• Modelling of possible solutions to assess their impact on outcomes;
• Development of operational and strategic reporting;
• Preservation and systematization of data.

In other words, Business Intelligence is a tool to help companies make optimal decisions based on a wide range of different indicators.

When exactly does a company need a bi-system?

In principle, all companies need such systems, especially if such processes are present:

• The need to integrate information from several sources;
• Need immediate access to data;
• The number of users who need access to information or an analyst has increased;
• New products are introduced or upgraded into IT;
• Individual parts of the company are lost from view; business grew rapidly.

BI-systems can be a valuable tool for decision-making and strategy development, as the data obtained will help the staff of marketing, sales, delivery, finance etc., staff.

In companies, target BI-systems can be Oracle BI, Microsoft analysis services, Microsoft Power BI, Qlik Sense. Consider these in more detail.

Oracle BI

In this variant, reporting is implemented in many, as Oracle BI is one of the oldest instruments, for a long time there was practically no alternative to it. In recent years, however, Oracle BI seems to be going back and there are reasons:

• Access to reporting requires harmonization and transparency of access is rather low;
• New subject areas rarely appear;
• It is not possible to create dashboards with analytics.

Microsoft Analysis Services

It is also popular among companies, often due to users’ preference to work with Excel.

Microsoft Power BI

One of the newer tools that business is actively pursuing is for the following reasons:

Good design of the basic set of visualizations;

Kernels are licensed on the server, not individual users;

The development of reports takes place quite quickly.

It is already worth highlighting the trend of translating reports from Qlik Sense to Power BI precisely because new users can be connected for free, which is essential for companies with a large number of employees.

Qlik Sense

It is a corporate BI-system with the ability to implement full dashboards. It was the advent of Qlik Sense that prompted the company to move from table data to graphics.

However, there is no significant increase in reporting compared to Oracle BI and Analysis Services because:

• A licence for one user is expensive;
• It takes a long time from data preparation to implementation of reports, which does not allow to quickly transfer all business processes to the new tool.

Thus, the main factors that make it necessary to choose a BI-system are the cost of connection of new users (especially if the staff is large), the length of the full implementation cycle of the report and the ease of its creation in the BI-system.