” The best vision is Insights.” – Malcolm Forbes
Today’s Business Intelligence is a key tool for companies because it brings insights into the day-to-day operation, providing analysis and forecasting, in other words, the Power of Knowledge!
As reviewed in the previous 3 articles, Business Intelligence systems focus on collecting data from the most diverse sources and formats, then transforming it into knowledge and making it available to different decision makers within an organization.
From this knowledge, the decision maker can develop his own conclusions, or BI system itself presents as useful information (Insights). These insights are the rationale behind Business Intelligence.
They can tell us what happened (for example as a KPI), say something about the future (forecast) or an action to be taken. Traditional BI is essentially strategic, and top management may even use it in a more tactical way, but today’s BI brings insights to day-to-day operation.
And it is worth noting that any insight has precedence. Data is generated by processes and patterned on information, based on assumptions. An insight is based on knowledge and can also rely on human judgment.
This leads us to question – despite knowing how insight occur – what should we do with it?
Doing nothing is not a good option. If insight tells us everything is fine, we should note that. If Insight requires action, we must also record it, along with the measures that must be taken. Often, Business Intelligence reports do not meet these aims and fall into passive Business Intelligence. We should therefore not rely on the weaknesses of human nature to complete these actions, using active Business Intelligence.
Modern BI tools, such as Power BI, allow from these insights to act, manually or automatically, guiding the user from his context to the appropriate process.
Why is Business Intelligence a key tool for companies? Because it gives us Analysis and Forecasting, that is, the Power of Knowledge.
