Business intelligence comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data
analysis of business information. BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of
business operations.

Business intelligence is using data to make business decisions. Usually a company would invest in
tools and skills in order to manage enterprise data. Today the data used is getting more complex to
use because it is increasing in size and diversity. The data can come from various sources such as the
data from systems like the financial, sales, marketing, social media and accounting to name a few.
The challenge is to monitor all and lead the business into becoming competitive, profitable and
always growing.

You may need data that is not yet collected or available within your company, the question here
would be how can I get the data I need whether internally or externally. What if the data exists
somewhere and we are permitted to use it in our analysis and decision making, the question would
be, how ready and clean is the data? If the data is well managed and maintained over the years to
the extend where we can see trends of our customers behaviour, our purchasing trends and our
profit-making seasons, the question would be how far can I leverage this data in order to create new
revenue for the enterprise?
Business Intelligence is fundamental operations in today’s data centric society. The faster a business
interprets data and use in decision making to the extent of per second response to market changes,
the healthier the business and profitable.

There are many reasons why a company may want to start in business intelligence, but the main
ones can be summarised in the following broad reasons, a company

• Wants to understand what website visitors do on their website?
• How long time is spent on the website?
• From what countries do visitors come to the website?
• What marketing campaigns are working and which are not so good yet?
• What mobile devices do our users prefer?
• How good are our prices in the market?
• How can we convert visitors to buyers?
• What products or services we should focus on?
• How good are our support services to our clients before and after purchase?
• Can we use our current data to get more revenue?

When you spend over 25 years in software development, data analysis and business intelligence you will compile a list of lessons learnt, here are a few that I came across.

• Make regular backup of data
• Always have at least 3 environments to work in; production, development and test
• Listen carefully to the technically guys, they know where the rubber hits the road
• Pay attention to business leaders, they know where the business in heading
• Work regularly on data quality and communicate findings to leaders
• Test new tools for business intelligence that appear in the market
• Build a constantly learning culture on data and business intelligence
• Encourage stakeholders to interpret data and share their thoughts