BI

BI (Business Intelligence) is a broad categories of applications or technology used for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing business' raw data to make decision making better. BI is not only used for corporate marketing but also used to tell inefficient business processes that needs re-engineering.

For example, in some restaurant chains, BI is used to make strategic decisions such as what new foods to add to their menu, which foods need to be removed from the menu, which underperforming branches to remove. It can be used for tactical matters as well such as renegotiating with food suppliers and identify opportunities to improve inefficient processes.

Some pros and cons of BI includes:

Pros:

- Help you understand customer behaviour

- Make you aware of emerging crises

- help streamline operations

- help to develop and deliver better forecasting

Cons:

- costly for SMEs

- high complexity implementation

- time consuming implementation

- piling of historical data


 * Ehsanur Rahman Safwan

Business Intelligence (BI) is one of the modern versions of decision support systems (DSS) and consist of a set of applications that help transform the raw data to meaningful information useful for the business. BI provides the tools to managers and senior managers to take informed decisions to benefit the business.

Some of the common tasks performed using BI include: An example of the application of BI could be:
 * Reporting
 * Online analytical processing
 * Analytics
 * Data Mining
 * Business performance management
 * Benchmarking
 * Text mining
 * Predictive analytics
 * Knowledge Management

A hotel franchise uses BI analytical applications to compile statistics on average occupancy and average room rate to determine revenue generated per room. It can also get statistics on market share and data from customer surveys from its different hotels to understand and find out their competitive positioning in various countries. They can determine patterns on room demands and customer preference. Through using BI the hotel can serve their customers better, as they can know them better.

Some of the advantages of using BI for a company are ase follows: 


 * Improve decision making
 * Cut costs
 * Identify new business processes
 * Identify inneficient business processes
 * Enable business process reingeneering
 * Simplify and organize complex data

Some of the challenges facing BI include:
 * Ethical and cultural challenges
 * Requires clean data
 * Expensive
 * Huge accumulation of historical data
 * Time consuming implementation
 * Complex
 * Requires trained staff

=References=  Business Maps of India. (n.d.). Business Intelligence Disadvantages. Retrieved March 2014, 2014, from Business Maps of India: http://business.mapsofindia.com/business-intelligence/disadvantages.html

 McGeever, C. (2000, July 24). Business Intelligence. Retrieved March 19, 2014, from Computer World: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/47371/Business_Intelligence

 Mulcahy, R. (n.d.). Business Intelligence Definitions and Solutions. Retrieved March 19, 2014, from CIO: http://www.cio.com/article/40296/Business_Intelligence_Definition_and_Solutions



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