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Business Intelligence and analytics

Written by Ana Canteli on November 18, 2022

Business Intelligence (BI) is the set of strategies, methodologies, and technical means to create and manage knowledge through an organization's data. In short, it is about enabling data exploitation to improve solid decision-making. 

In any organization, vast amounts of data are produced every minute, every hour, and every day. Some of it can be valuable information captured at the right time. When analyzed and strategically used, it can improve the company’s performance, online presence, or position in the market.

Business Analytics (BA) is the set of means and practices to investigate an organization's past performance to gain insights and prepare the best organizational plan possible for the future. For this purpose, BA relies on data and statistical methods.

Differences between Business Intelligence and Business Analytics

What is the difference between business intelligence and business analytics?

Business analytics is a subset of business intelligence, a data management solution that includes business intelligence and business analytics.

BI combines business analytics, data mining, data visualization, tools and infrastructure (databases), and best practices for making data-driven decisions. It concentrates on the present and aims to answer what and how questions.

On the other hand, BA takes the organization's raw data and converts it into actionable and valuable information while detecting trends and generating predictive material to base organizational plans. It seeks to answer the whys and focuses on the past to prepare plans.

If you have an overview of the organization's data dashboards and can use them to drive change, eliminate errors, and adapt quickly to market trends or changes in the supply chain, you have a good BI in place.

Otherwise, it’s something that every organization should have, and the OpenKM and Acelera Pyme programs can make that happen.

Characteristics of business analytics

Given that business analytics is a subset of business intelligence, learning more about the topic reveals the aspects needed for BA to transform data into usable actions:

• Aggregation: collecting and organizing data before analysis.

• Data mining: classifying large data sets to identify patterns and relationships by identifying anomalies and creating data clusters.

• Predictive modeling: extracting information from datasets to identify patterns and estimate trends.

• Forecasting: using historical data to make predictions and identify upcoming risks and opportunities.

• Data visualization: creating graphical representations to improve human understanding of data.

Benefits of Business Intelligence

The benefits of business intelligence can be felt in the day-to-day running of the organization.

• Organizational efficiency: BI enables the dashboard to access data, have an overview of operations, and make comparisons more easily. This makes it easier to identify areas for improvement and new opportunities. Business intelligence tools can shorten HR’s time compiling reports or analyzing data, freeing up time for more strategic projects.

• Data governance and reliability: One of the immediate benefits of business intelligence is improving data organization and analysis. Without BI, each department's data is maintained separately, requiring users to access various platforms to generate reports, gather statistics, or fulfill the demands of their superiors.

Business intelligence allows an organization to combine all internal and external databases and obtain a previously inaccessible combination of data. Every action of a customer, an employee, or a supplier generates high-value information that, due to its dispersion, large quantity, and diverse quality, would be impossible to consider if it were not for this new data management solution.

• Evidence-based decisions: access to accurate data and the ability to generate reports more quickly allows for better decision-making. In the past, waiting for days or weeks for reports was common and came with the risk of them becoming obsolete by the time they were ready. Business intelligence makes it possible to access information in near real-time.

• Quick and intuitive access: Another critical feature of business intelligence is its ability to make what was previously complex and challenging to understand simpler and clearer - at least to non-technical staff.

BI solutions are designed to analyze large amounts of data - in the cloud or on the server - from multiple, combined sources. They store them in a unified way to analyze data based on user queries, which can lead to substantial improvement in process management.

• Increased employee satisfaction: Users who had no means of accessing data directly or could not work with it until an analyst managed it was forced to send many requests to IT and data processing departments. Now, thanks to business intelligence platforms, employees can work directly with the data and generate their reports, graphs, and statistics without needing technical expertise.

• Competitive improvement: Companies working with up-to-date and reliable data have allowed them to stay relevant in the industry while accurately predicting customer needs.

• Increased customer satisfaction: business intelligence positively affects customer management, improving their experience as users of our products or services and their overall satisfaction. The number of encounters with the client can be minimized using the data collected and analyzed because of business intelligence.

OpenKM, a digitizing agent within the Digital Kit program, is registered in the Business Intelligence category and other exciting and compatible categories such as Electronic Invoicing and Virtual Office.

Applications are currently open for Segment II beneficiaries (companies with 3 to 9 employees) and Segment III (companies with between 0 and 3 employees).

These organizations, based in Spain, receive non-refundable grants of between €2,000 and €6,000.

The OpenKM platform has all the necessary functionalities to create a customized business intelligence and analytics platform.

OpenKM is committed to adjusting the price of our products and services to the budget of the digital voucher, so we encourage you to take advantage of this unique opportunity while this offer lasts.

Contact us to find out how to apply for the subsidy.