Types of BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

The advent of Information Technology has transformed the way in which organizations maintain their data. From the old warehouses storing heaps of files to the digital warehouses we have come long way. Every organization understands the importance of information in this fiercely competitive world. The challenge is how an organization can bring all the data together to extract information that would be useful for it.

BI (Business Intelligence) helps organizations organize and analyze its data to make better decisions. This could include internal data from various departments as well as data from external sources, such as competitors, social media channels or even macroeconomic information.

As more and more organizations are capturing information in the digital format, their need for using BI to manage and analyze these data is increasing. Over the past few decades, companies that have deployed Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and other applications are now sitting on a mountain of data that can be analyzed. In addition, the growth of the Web has increased the demand for tools that can analyze large data sets.So since we all agree on the importance of BI Tools, next question is how to identify the best BI tool for your organization. There are broadly three categories of BI Tools:

• Data Management: First step for better decision making is good database. Data management tools help you clean the data and organize it in structured formats that can be used to generate useful information for analysis. This process is normally referred to as ETL (Extract, Transform and Load), where the tools extract data from various distributed sources, transforms it into a standard format and loads the final data into the centralized target system.

• Data Discovery/Data Mining: These systems surf through the entire heap of data and tries to identify meaningful patterns and trends that can provide a direction to decision making.

• Reporting Tools: It’s a known fact that most of the time the users of the data are not the IT Staff but the Business users. Thus it becomes extremely important that only the useful information is presented to them in a non-technical user-friendly way. For e.g. Dashboards/scorecards providing the overview of company’s performance and a snapshot of key indicators with graphical representation would help a manager identify the areas for improvement and take necessary steps at right time.

Most of the BI Tools in the market would be a combination of all the above and provide an end to end solution. The choice of the software would usually depend upon the target users, size of the organization, existing sources of data, etc. Thus an organization must choose the BI Tools that best suits its current and future needs.

About Author:

Harsh Saraogi is consultant and part of Systems Plus Pvt. Ltd. He is a part of consulting team that delivers Sourcing and Vendor Management Office projects. He can be contacted at: harshvardhan.s@spluspl.com