Financial Management & ERP Software Tools News & Tips
Your Company Information Is a Gold Mine. Profit from It!
by Tom Lawrence, CPA
First, raise your Business Intelligence IQ.
When you read the phrase Business Intelligence, did you instinctively think of a Harvard MBA in a three piece suit? Or perhaps a group of engineers at a Fortune 500 company working on the next big product breakthrough? If so, you are not alone. Most business people today don’t really know what Business Intelligence is, or more importantly, what it can do for them and their business. Smart businesses are getting on the ground floor to raise their Business Intelligence IQ so they can raise their profit.
Business Intelligence, or BI for short, is a broad subject area with many separate and distinct disciplines within its borders. However, there is one key element to any BI definition and that involves your most valuable asset other than your employees. What’s that, you ask? Your Information!
The Wikipedia definition below is a good place to start:
Business intelligence (BI) refers to technologies, applications and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of business information and sometimes to the information itself. The purpose of business intelligence is to support better business decision making.
Although Information is a key element in defining BI, it represents only a piece of the equation. The other necessary piece is a means for analyzing and presenting the information. In other words, all the information in the world can’t help you make a decision if you don’t have a way to look at it intelligently, and therein lies the source of the buzz surrounding BI today.
Why all the excitement? Analytical tools are getting much more powerful and – here’s the best news - coming down in price. The myriad of powerful yet affordable analytical tools on the market today take traditional report writing to the next level by allowing you to “slice and dice” the information on the fly and then present it using the most desirable visualization technique for the situation. No longer are you forced to look at your information through a static report. Once the domain of only the largest companies because of the huge price tags the technology carried, BI is now accessible to small and midsized businesses. In fact, both Sage and Microsoft are building some BI functionality directly into their ERP offerings.
How can your business take full advantage of BI? In my future columns, I'll be discussing practical BI solutions that can offer your business immediate benefits. Stay tuned!
