The term Business Intelligence (BI) refers to technologies, applications and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of business information. To overcome the limitations of these systems, business intelligence relies on a set of tools that facilitate the processes of extraction, purification, analysis and storage of data, with appropriate speed in order to support the decision making process of the business.
Keep in mind, though, that there are pitfalls to self-service BI as well By steering your business users into becoming ad hoc data engineers, you can end up with a chaotic mix of metrics that vary across departments, run into data security problems, and even run up big licensing or SaaS bills if there’s no centralized control over tool rollout.
Sporadic use of the term business intelligence dates back to at least the 1860s, but consultant Howard Dresner is credited with first proposing it in 1989 as an umbrella phrase for applying data analysis techniques to support business decision-making processes.
Working in close collaboration with the Technology Development team (who create custom software to collect and store this data) Business Intelligence is the central nervous system of information at Komaza, and is tasked with designing new visualization tools, dashboards and human systems for leveraging data in our day-to-day operations.
While many organizations have invested in a desktop or on-premise KPI dashboard, an exciting new possibility for “going pervasive” is mobile BI. Mobile BI dashboards offer a level of accessibility that is not possible with desk-bound tools — today’s mobile BI solutions are accessible> via any smartphone (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry), tablet (iPad, iPad2), or Internet browser.