What is Business Intelligence and how can it help your company?

The term Business Intelligence (or BI) defines the use of information technology to identify, discover and analyze business data, such as sales revenue, products, costs and market share.

Normally BI technology offers current, historical and predictive data, in this case especially if Artificial Intelligence is used to create predictive models. These data are structured internally for products and departments in order to establish more effective decision making and strategic operational insights through functions such as: on-line analytical processing (OLAP), reporting, predictive analytics, data/text mining, benchmarking and enterprise performance management (BPM). These technologies and functions are often referred to as information management.

Thanks to Business Intelligence processes we can collect information from multiple sources that a company has, from customer behavior to production performance or employee productivity, to transform the data and make decisions on dashboards in real time.

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Business Intelligence vs Big Data

In recent years, you've surely heard the term Big Data more and more; but there's a consideration to be made:

A company can have vast amounts of data sources available thanks to Big Data, but they will be worthless if they cannot be translating and transforming into useful and usable information.

This is where business intelligence comes into play, a discipline, with a corresponding category of platforms and tools, that has the following objectives objective to make data-driven strategy and decision making effective.

For your better understanding, "Business Intelligence" refers to the strategies and technologies used by companies to analyze valuable business datathat go beyond traditional reporting. Data is the most valuable resource for today's businesses and when used correctly and securely, it remains the best way for business owners to stay ahead of the curve and make informed and correct decisions.

What is Business Intelligence software?

There are numerous BI technologies, ranging from complete platforms with specific Business Intelligence tools to integrated applications, which are embedded within other applications, such as CRM for Commercial Management (link to SAIL page when created).

Some of the most common business intelligence applications are data analysis tools, supply and demand planning tools, predictive analytics and warehouse management systems.

Thanks to BI, tedious, resource-intensive and time-consuming tasks for employees are completely eliminated and can be devoted to knowledge-based activities.

For example, reports are not based on simple spreadsheets, BI platforms can be used to deliver visualizations linked to everything from workspace efficiency thanks to the Tailor-made sales KPIs and suggestions for optimizing loyalty campaigns. Again, the ability to suggest and optimize would be supported by the Artificial Intelligence capabilities that will be incorporated into the exploitation of the data handled by the BI.

In the case of GAMCO, we have developed a Intelligent business software (SAIL) with which we are able to dismiss the POTENTIAL and increase customer loyalty and SALES of your business by automatically obtaining knowledge and self-adjusting predictive models with which we are able to improve business decision making. This technology allows us to know at all times:

What to offer, to Whom and How to do it

Our dashboards transform large amounts of data so that users can easily understand their business metrics and above all, so that they can be used by decision makers in any company to improve decision making.

It also allows it to be implemented in operations, helping users to make the best decisions aligned with management, providing value to the customer and helping them to meet their business objectives.

What can you do with Business Intelligence?

Taking into account all that has been said so far, the best question at this point would be: What CANNOT be done with Business Intelligence?

The possibilities of data analysis are significant thanks to the different metrics with which the business is measured.

One way to understand the data and apply it to the job or position in the company is to think in terms of questions and answers.

Here are some examples of business questions that a BI tool coupled with AI capabilities can answer:

• What type of customers are most likely to buy a particular product or service?
• Which services are more successful than others and to whom should they be offered?
• What factors affect the loyalty of my customers?
• How satisfied are my customers by region, product or vertical?
• Which customer has a high probability of abandoning us?

You know that GAMCO's SAIL solution incorporates a module for predicting the abandonment of customers up to 60 days in advance and of products or services by these users.

Is it useful to apply Business Intelligence?

This question is really easy to answer: Absolutely yes!

The reason this question may come up in conversation with someone who doesn't exactly know the subject is because the term itself is not particularly fashionable, but.... Did you know that the term Business Intelligence has roots dating back to 1865?

In fact, in that year a book was published entitled: "Cyclopedia Of Commercial And Business Anecdotes"The following sentence describes the strategy of a banker named Sir Henry Furnese and the information in his possession aimed at increasing his profits:

"In the Netherlands, Flanders, France and Germany, he maintained a complete and seamless Business Intelligence train". 

(The passage goes on to say that Furnese also planted misinformation to manipulate the markets to his benefit, but that's another story entirely.)

But if we travel to a more recent date, computer scientist Hans Peter Luhn published a landmark article in 1958: "A Business Intelligence System" in the IBM Journal of Research and Development". Many see Luhn as the originator of the modern term and its meaning in business and IT contexts.

Conclusions

In short, Business Intelligence describes a series of methods, tools and strategies that serve to obtain relevant data from your business to transform information into knowledge and improve the decision-making process.

Thanks to the technology of GAMCOWe can offer different business intelligence solutions through data management, new data discovery, reporting tools and Artificial Intelligence.

Business Intelligence is a process that takes raw data that most people would not understand and transforms it into understandable and usable information to do their job better.