Business intelligence (BI) is making strides in in its recognition and inclusion in big business and the digitalization of businesses and marketplaces. What was once reserved for computer geeks and tech nerds has now become indispensable for the business and enterprise community; business intelligence has simply made it easier to conduct transactions worldwide.
While the financial strata are certainly reaping the benefits of digitalization, what about technology itself. More specifically, how would the technology industry use business intelligence?
This is a pretty technical term, one that would resonate better with business graduates or people reading books usually meant for MBA students. For the sake of better understanding the question, lets break down the question.
How would the technology industry use business intelligence: firstly, what is business intelligence and what is it primarily used for? We take a look,
What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence (BI) is defined, in the simplest terms, as “data analysis of business statistics, trends and information”. More specifically, business intelligence involves in it a myriad of functions which had previously been performed by separate personnel, with a separate department and separate computers. Business intelligence includes, but is certainly not limited to,
Analytical processing
Business performance management
Prediction of trends
Complex event processing
This is just the tip of the iceberg of the tasks that business intelligence is capable of churning out in a matter of minutes. What usually took weeks and months of market research, customer insight and market trends to produce a single report can now be done with business intelligence in hours.
Not only that, business intelligence also involves strategies and the computing power of advanced business and database processors to make new business strategies; similarly, business intelligence can also help create and identify new business opportunities using processed and even raw data, which is what makes them different from other data processors. Click here to read more articles.
How Would the Technology Industry use Business Intelligence?
While there are many uses of the business intelligence (as inadequately enumerated above), in the technology industry itself, whose brainchild is this BI, it might seem counterproductive at first. But the fact is, that business intelligence still has uses in the technology industry, some of which are explained below.
This is because the technology industry is no different than the regular, conventional business sector; the former still has data that needs to be processed (more complex than the business sector) and has tons of uses. Without any further ado, here are uses of BI in the technology industry,
BI for Integration of Data Architectures:
For the industry outsider or the layman, who doesn’t want to get into all that computer mumbo-jumbo, the very complex sounding term can be boiled down to a simple concept: data storage.
While data doesn’t take physical space, it does take virtual space and the way space goes is it eventually fills up, which pushes the need for new virtual space (or a server).
The matter of the fact is that technology industry has a ton of data that needs to be stored and shelved off for future analyzing, which is where business intelligence comes in.
You see, with the business intelligence systems on board, a technology company dealing with information technology (IT) can merge together the vast reserves of data, without the need for additional servers or any other mechanism, simply because BI systems are better at storing large amounts of data and simultaneously processing them than regular business or technology databases. So, there is the first use of business intelligence for the technology industry.
Business Intelligence for Enhanced Data Security:
Big data requires big security. The vaster and more valuable your data is, the more vulnerable and at-risk it is from elements like hackers and information-thieves out to hold ‘data as a hostage’ with the random ransomware they spread out on the internet.
As such, there are two security dilemmas technology companies face regularly; who gets access to the data and how to protect said data from unlawful access through unintended malware and ransomware.
What it means is, if a person or user is cleared to access the database but unintentionally provides access for a malware, how would that situation be tackled and how would the data be secured. The answer: BI solutions again.
Business intelligence and its various applications ensure that data restrictions stay enforced and also protect big data from falling into the wrong hands. What’s more, platforms with BI integrated in them allow access only to the verified and allowed user and even then, will monitor several different parameters about the data: what data is being viewed and processed at a given time and whether any foreign software has been detected in the server. BI makes data security easier.
BI for Increased Data Storage and Access:
Business intelligence software and systems can help create pathways for easy access and storage of data. While this point may seem belabored, the fact is, that modern data storage is a very different science from two, maybe three decades before.
Whereas earlier examples of how data was stored are quite primitive and barebones, today’s data is encrypted, secured and far from its predecessor, which makes storing it and accessing it a hefty task as well.
This is where business intelligence systems come in and simplify the equation. BI software like Tableau and others organize and access data from various sources seamlessly and in an instant, making data processing an absolute breeze to be done.
For User Needs and Analyze Business Trends:
The tech industry, as explained beforehand, is just like any other industry out there. It has customers, end users and business and market fluctuations that it needs to predict and act in accordance with. Business intelligence systems do all that and more.
They allow technology companies to view customer trends, market fluctuations and changes and the customer’s needs and analyze it, which allows such systems to accurately predict the trends and how they will change over time.
These systems can also help formulate strategies and business plans just by the inclusion of data; both of whose types can be used; raw, unprocessed data or processed data.
