Business Intelligence (BI) is all about gathering and organizing the data your business or organization generates in its different activities. The data is analyzed and visualized in order to understand it and gain valuable insights into business activities and performance. These insights can be used to make better decisions.

Here is a YouTube video by Adam Finer – Learn BI Online called 7 Business Intelligence Terms Everyone Should Know | BI For Beginners. Many of these terms we’ve discussed on this site.

Here’s a YouTube video called What is Business Intelligence? BI for Beginners. It’s only about 6 and a half minutes long.

This data comes from your internal accounting systems and many other places such as social media websites. What if we could bring these data sources together to get a clearer picture of how our organization is really doing? We may be asking questions about our market share for example. Is it growing? Just because our profits are up in the past year doesn’t mean our market share is growing. We need more data!

A dashboard can quickly help you identify areas of your business that are doing well and not so well. You can spot trends. You can spot correlations.

BI versus Data Science

BI tends to produce reports, dashboards and queries on business questions for the current period and the past. Typically dashboards aggregate historical data and summarize and present it in some way. That’s great. BI provides hindsight and some insight and usually answers questions related to when, where and what events occurred. We may learn that in the last quarter we sold 15% more vegetables in the Noth region compared to the same quarter a year ago. BI doesn’t tell us why.

Data Science may be able to give us insights as to why something happened. Data science tends to use disaggegated data in a more forward-looking, exploratory way, focussing on analyzing the present and enabling informed decisions about the future. The data science team may use time series analysis to forcast future sales more accurately that simply extending a trend line from a linear regression analysis. Data science tends to ask “what if” questions. They may ask for the optimal scenario. They may ask what will happen in the future if these trends continue. They may ask why.

BI tends to require highly structured data, in rows and columns for example, whereas data science projects tend to use many types of data sources.

Learn with YouTube

What is Business Intelligence? | Google Business Intelligence Certificate. This is one hour and 15 minutes long. It’s by Google and the speaker is Sally.