Companies
and organizations as they do business collect large amount of data.
Known as the corporate data, it consists of important information
dealing with business operations, current business trends, business
strategies of their competitors, latest events and fads and so on.
This data needs to be consolidated for future reference especially
when companies and organizations want to plan strategically their
business processes. Moreover, interpretation and analysis of this
data can provide valuable insights into their business operations.
This in turn would help to identify areas that need improvement,
achieve operational efficiency, increase sales, reduce costs,
identify new business opportunities and make powerful business
decisions.
Business intelligence is the identification and
analysis of company’s disparate data to extract meaningful
information for more effective decision-making. Forrester Research
defines Business Intelligence as “a set of methodologies,
processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data
into meaningful and useful information used to enable more effective
strategic, tactical, and operational insights and
decision-making."
However, since mountains of data are
developed and collected, companies and organizations need effective
tools to manage data efficiently. With the volume of data growing at
an unprecedented rate, what is required are effective tools that do
more than just organize and deliver information. With the help of
eminent market players who have been ranked among the best
product development companies, organizations can develop tools
that can analyze and interpret data quickly and provide them the
much-needed competitive advantage. Let us look at some of the
important functions of business
intelligence tools.
Online Analytical Processing
(OLAP)
OLAP is a category of software
product development tools that helps to selectively extract
information from multidimensional data and view it from multiple
perspectives. It comprises of three important operations and they are
consolidation, drill-down, and slicing and dicing.
Data
Mining
It is the process of extracting hidden information from
large mountains of data and delivering it in a way that is
comprehensible and understandable. Data mining tools help to forecast
future trends.
Process Mining
It is the process of
extracting information from event logs to analyze the processes and
thereby identify the problem areas. Process mining provides the
necessary tools and techniques to extract process, control, data,
organizational, and social structures from event logs.
Analytics
It
is the process of analyzing the business data for developing
recommendations to improve business performance in the
future.
Complex Event Processing
It is the process of
identifying the most relevant events from the cloud of events
happening in a company or organization; analyze the impact or effect
of those events so that the most appropriate action can be taken at
the right time.
Predictive Analytics
As the name suggests,
it is the process of analyzing current and historical facts to
provide forecast on future events.
Also read on
- nearshore development
services, Product
lifecycle management