Business intelligence, or BI, helps you analyze your business processes comprehensively so that you have a complete understanding of your business. The term is often misunderstood as competitive intelligence, but these are not synonymous. With business intelligence, the focus is solely on your business and what you can do in order to prosper at a high rate.

BI can help you make smarter decisions, which in turn increase your efficiency. There is a lot of data that is at your fingertips, but how can you understand it at a deeper level? If you sit down to gather all your business data and to make sense of it yourself, then you can go insane especially if you have tons of data. Data can come from various sources and gathering the data, along with understanding all of it, can be tough. Even if you do manage to gather the data, inaccuracies can be part of your data gathering process.

What is BI?

You can think of BI as an amalgamation of tools, infrastructure, practices, and the software. BI makes it easy for you to make decisions based on the analysis that it provides you with. It helps to improve your business in more than one way which is why it is so beneficial to your business.

Basically, BI makes all the data analysis easy to understand. You will be able to get insights that are deeper and laid out for you in a manner that makes the most sense. These insights can help you make informed decisions about your business as far as boosting productivity and enabling you to focus on your business to increase profits. When you have such a powerful medium in your hands, you can focus on things that will make a difference in the following ways:

1. Customize BI for your business
BI for is for every type of business. While it was once only limited for use by larger corporations due to the cost factor along with the infrastructure that was required. Today, recent technology innovations, such as cloud computing have made BI useful for small and medium businesses as well. Business intelligence software tools that are in the market right now are able to work for all type of businesses and they can be customized.

2. Value added data
BI gives you analysis in the form of reports, which can help with managing risks and controlling costs. You can analyze the patterns in your business too. You can determine the difference between the estimated expenditure and the actual expenditure in your business. In addition, you can learn about the financial situation and what has caused it with the help of BI. You can get a better picture of where your business is standing and how it is currently doing.

3. Risk management
You can get a risk management overview with the help of business intelligence tools. When you are able to find out about the risk areas in your business, you are able to make decisions to solve them before they get bigger. Hence, you are able to get the smallest details about your business with the help of business intelligence. This can enable you to make decisions that can make a big impact on your business decisions.