Business Intelligence - An Introduction

 I have been thinking quite a while to write something about Business Intelligence for extreme beginners. When i started developing interest on Data and BI, I saw a lot of different explanations, stories, myths and facts about BI. There were contradictions in many of them, so I thought it would be really helpful if some one can explain these things in layman's language. So here you go! This is a short introduction to BI and how it became a buzz word for an extreme beginners.

What is Business Intelligence?

It is a technology which gets right data to right people at right time, so that they can make more effective Business decisions. As we are developing, the amount of data that we have to deal with is increasing exponentially. From mega bytes and giga bytes to zetta bytes and yotta bytes the increase in the volume of data is immense and has become really difficult to handle. To sort out the right data from this huge chunk is a tedious task, Business Intelligence technologies help us to find out the right data specific to each user in right time.  Let us dig some more deep into the evolution of BI technologies!

Evolution of Business Intelligence.

An evolution has been taking place in the world of Business intelligence and analytics over years. The evolution of BI is considered as a series of technology waves. The first wave is called as the Technical BI, this was around 1990s. It could take weeks of IT work and coding to create a series of highly formatted reports. During the first generation of BI, the business simply could not make a snapshot of the reactive decisions. User had to contact the IT team for each and every small change required and this was so tedious and time consuming.  

If business users could take care of their own data needs, you wouldn't need to rely on data people or those slow, expensive databases at all. This led to the advent of the second wave in BI, called the Self Service BI. The rise of both standardized data warehouses, in-memory engines and Web technologies made possible the access of large amount of normalized data through intuitive drag-and-drop report and dashboard building tools. Analysts and business users could finally self-serve their analysis without the involvement on IT personnel.

The Third wave of BI brings us to the present, known as the End-User BI. This brings us neatly to today, a world of increasingly multi-structured data sets that all need to be analyzed. With this generation, the End-Users themselves access the data and generate analysis reports as and when the need.  Business users are now recognizing the  responsibility of using data to create more value whether it is to keep costs down, drive additional sales, engage customers more fully or improve efficiency. There are a lot of BI tools available in the market which can easily help us to achieve our needs.Tableau, Power BI and Qlik are few of the most popular ones available.