From the course: Introduction to Career Skills in Data Analytics

What is BI and the value to business?

From the course: Introduction to Career Skills in Data Analytics

What is BI and the value to business?

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- Have you ever heard the phrase, Our company makes data driven decisions? Well, of course they do. And they are making data driven decisions all the time. It could just be bad decisions because the data is bad. Data driven decisions happen all the time. We need more money in the account, So someone get those salespeople motivated. That is a data driven decision and action. The problem is this is a single data point and at a crisis moment. I tend to ask people if they want to be data informed? Data and business intelligence, lets you have both information and the ability to make intelligent business decisions. For example, with the correct data and an understanding of the process and the business goals defined with a solid set of KPI, key performance indicators, a business can see a downward trend in sales before it becomes a problem. This allows the business an opportunity to course correct to attempt to prevent a crisis moment. For business intelligence to be practical, it requires you to store the data that's important to the business and all its processes. You can't just focus on one number like our earlier example. Just knowing one number and that you have to hit it, means that you understand the goal. However, it's not all the information you need. All the other data that impacts that goal needs to be analyzed with the business roles. Fortunately, we have business intelligence tools and they are a tool to build business intelligence with. The tools do not provide it by themselves. Just like a hammer requires nails and someone to use it to build something. Businesses need to define the metrics that help them track the overall health of the organization. Again, these metrics are KPIs. Let me make it practical. And I'll use health as an example. If you know your heart rate as an adult is supposed to be anywhere between 60 to 100 beats per minute and you watch it every day and suddenly you see it spike and stay elevated, it would indicate that something is happening to make your heart beat faster. With a bit more information like tracking what you eat or drink, you can analyze this data and you notice that it's elevated when you drink a certain type of drink and it stays elevated for a couple of hours and then goes back down. To make an adjustment, you can stop drinking that drink or reduce the amount of it. Whatever the adjustment is, you make it, you then analyze your heart rate to determine the adjustment to see if it made a difference. When you apply this concept to the overall health of business then you can easily determine what the heart rate of the business is. And what are the items that impact it. This allows you to start to define the metrics that help you monitor the health of the business and provide business intelligence.

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