You may have heard this term or its acronym - BI. BI refers to technologies, applications and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of business information. The purpose of business intelligence--a term that dates at least to 1958--is to support better business decision making.
In an attempt to take advantage of the growing awareness of the term (and a lack of awareness about what the term means) many accounting software vendors proclaim that they have built in BI. Unfortunately, thus far this has equated to little more than some reports, graphs and summary screens. Often to get even this, significant technical knowledge was required.
As demonstrated in our presentation, BI is the promise of being able to understand relationships. There is an argument that this first generation of BI (BI 1.0) helped but that BI 2.0 will bring much more functionality to a less technical user. Note that in our presentation, the people who were doing the analysis, in real time, were senior managers, not techies!
Some of the tools we have implemented with our clients to provide varying levels of Business Intelligence:
- Microsoft Excel - including Excel Analysis Services, Pivot tables & charts. Can be a good starting point as nearly everyone has used Excel. Downside - there is little to no support for integrity, security and versioning.
- Microsoft Office SharePoint Services - Allow your team to keep in touch & access the critical performance indicators they need to manage. Setting up proactive monitoring of key performance indicators is a snap complete with automated notification.
- Tableau Software - a perfect solution for many of your management reporting requirements. Not only does Tableau allow you to query just about any database to see the data the way you need to see it, but you can also do many other amazing things.