Business Intelligence: What You Need to Know

Business intelligence (BI) is a set of technologies that convert data into actionable insights, enabling more informed strategic decision-making. It presents data as reports, visualizations, and dashboards, which may include graphs, maps, and textual summaries. BI helps managers correlate data from different sources to reveal trends. The modern data stack comprises data sources, a data warehouse, an ETL tool, and analytics software. To generate useful business intelligence, the first step is to replicate OLTP data into an OLAP platform like a data warehouse. Then, reporting software can be used to create reports, visualizations, and dashboards. While BI tools are excellent at presenting data, they cannot make decisions for users. Managers still need human expertise to consider budgets, workforce availability, organizational goals, and priorities when making strategic and tactical decisions based on the insights provided by BI tools.