BI crucial to making the right decision: business intelligence is all about collecting useful information from multiple sources and then presenting it in an easy to understand format.

AuthorHarding, Wayne
PositionSpecial Report: Business Intelligence

The major difference between a personal purchase decision and a business decision is the potential results measured in dollars. These results can be positive or negative, but are rarely neutral. Your decisions can result in gains or losses that exceed last year's total revenue, or the result can be a major gain or loss of market share to competitors. Every decision has to be supported by relevant data. How you make smart decisions is based on your ability to combine information and intelligence before, during and after the decision-making process.

Information is the heart and soul of the expanding digital economy. Business intelligence is created from data and resources that owners and managers collect and retain. It represents a synthesis of all kinds of numerical data: standard accounting, economic factors, sales statistics and expense analysis. The data is created in many forms, in many places and with varying degrees of volume. Obviously, the number of daily stock trading transactions is far greater than the number of airplanes sold in one day.

Business intelligence focuses on two key components: data, and your ability to make decisions from that data. This process demands that you obtain as much data as available, from sources both inside and outside the enterprise. Collecting this data extends beyond financial transactions and should include other facts and opinions, which may require terabytes of storage, depending on the company's size and the scope of the issue.

While technology has enabled major improvements in business intelligence, its core processes are not new; for many years, people have managed businesses using their intuition and a gut understanding of their markets. While their decision-making process was not formalized, the process seemed to work well enough. Key questions to ask include:

* What is working and why?

* What is broken and why?

* Are you spending too much money for the previous results?

* What processes are taking too much time and why?

* Where do you think you are missing opportunities?

* What decisions created a bad result?

* What decisions created a good result?

BI Components: Data Gathering

Business intelligence is all about collecting useful information from multiple sources and then presenting it in an easy to understand format.

Once this information is easily grasped, necessary actions become clear. Typically, data might include: bookkeeping records; text documents such as memos or reports; picture or...

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