Business intelligence (BI) and data management (DM) are two of the crucial functions for decision-making in any modern organization today. Both help organizations leverage their data to gain insights, improve processes, and achieve strategic objectives.
Business Intelligence is a set of technologies, applications, and processes that help organizations to turn data into actionable insights. It encompasses a wide range of data-related activities, including data mining, data analysis, and data visualization. The goal of BI is to provide organizations with the information they need to make informed decisions about their operations and future. BI solutions typically include dashboards, reports, and interactive visualizations that provide a consolidated view of data from multiple sources.
Business intelligence helps organizations become data-driven enterprises, improve performance and gain competitive advantage. They can :
- Improve ROI by understanding the business and intelligently allocating resources to meet strategic objectives.
- Unravel customer behavior, preferences and trends, and use the insights to better target prospects or tailor products to changing market needs.
- Monitor business operations and fix or make improvements on an ongoing basis, fueled by data insights.
- Improve supply chain management by monitoring activity up and down the line and communicating results with partners and suppliers.
Organizations benefit when they can fully assess operations and processes, understand their customers, gauge the market, and drive improvement. They need the right tools to aggregate business information from anywhere, analyze it, discover patterns and find solutions.
The BI software supports this decision-making process by :
- Connecting to a wide variety of different data systems and data sets including databases and spreadsheets.
- Providing deep analysis, helping users uncover hidden relationships and patterns in their data.
- Presenting answers in informative and compelling data visualizations like reports, maps, charts and graphs.
- Enabling side-by-side comparisons of data under different scenarios.
- Providing drill-down, drill-up and drill-through features, enabling users to investigate different levels of data.
Advanced BI and analytics systems may also integrate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to automate and streamline complex tasks. These capabilities further accelerate the ability of enterprises to analyze their data and gain insights at a deep level.
Data management is the process of collecting, storing, processing, and maintaining data in an organized and secure manner. This process involves the use of various technologies and tools to manage the lifecycle of data, from its creation to its eventual disposal. DM is a critical function in any organization, as it ensures that data is accurate, consistent, and secure. DM activities include data governance, data quality management, and data security.
Data Management provides the foundation on which good Business Intelligence rests. It depends heavily on how good Data Management implementation is. Think of Data Management as a pipeline. Business Intelligence sits at the far end of the pipeline and only sees data as filtered by various Data Management processes such quality control, cleaning, and preparation for later report insights. Data Management issues are magnified once they reach the BI end of the pipeline. How the data is presented in a reporting application reveals a lot about the Data Management processes further up the pipeline.
Data preparation is a key function within the entire Data Management pipeline. An organization can’t have an effective BI program without good data. The benefits of BI are exponential in proportion to the quality of that data. Once the data is in good order, understanding the specific organizational BI requirements and finding the right solution that satisfies those best is imperative. It’s all about creating an effective intersection between traditional Data Management processes and downstream BI requirements, but that intersection needs to flow both ways.
Having effective BI and DM strategies in place can bring a number of benefits to an organization. These include:
- Improved Decision-Making: BI provides organizations with the information they need to make informed decisions about their operations and future. By leveraging data, organizations can gain insights into key trends, customer behavior, and market dynamics.
- Increased Operational Efficiency: DM helps organizations to manage their data effectively, ensuring that it is accurate, consistent, and secure. This can help organizations to streamline their processes, reduce errors, and improve efficiency.
- Better Customer Experience: With BI and DM, organizations can gain a deeper understanding of their customers and the factors that influence their behavior. This can help organizations to create a better customer experience and improve customer loyalty.
- Competitive Advantage: By leveraging data to make informed decisions and improve operations, organizations can gain a competitive advantage over their competitors.
Implementation of appropriate BI & DM application systems requires some importants matters:
- BI strategy and BI architecture development to the establishment of a BI Services with regard to content, process, technology and organization, aligned with the corporate goals ;
- Design and implementation of data warehouse solutions including operating data management (ETL tools) ;
- Data quality management and data governance including KPI harmonization, Master Data Management and data clean-up ;
- Building operational BI solutions for processes in sales, purchasing, controlling, production, marketing, among others, for solutions such as transfer pricing monitoring, end-to-end profitability calculations, working capital optimization, cash-flow analysis…
In conclusion, DM helps organizations to manage their data effectively understanding the variety of available internal and external data requires consistent management of quality, availability , while Business Intelligence describes the ability of an organization to manage data and information to create a deeper business insight, and thereby make better decisions. Effective BI and DM strategies can bring a number of benefits to organizations, including improved decision-making, increased operational efficiency, better customer experience, and competitive advantage.
Sources :
https://www.dataversity.net/data-management-vs-business-intelligence/
https://kpmg.com/md/en/home/services/advisory/consulting/business-intelligence/
https://www.ibm.com/topics/business-intelligence
https://www.cio.com/article/272364/business-intelligence-definition-and-solutions.html
https://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/management/bi-data-management/
Auteur: Adil BENKADDOUR / Master 2 Commerce Electronique, Unistra/Edge, Casablanca, Maroc
