It’s essential to understand the definition of Business Intelligence (BI) first. We are not going into any technical definition rather will keep it simple and practical.
We can’t say it like ‘using data to make accurate or perfect decisions’ because decisions are made by the concerned authority based on data analysis, and every person’s ability to analyze data is different. It is more about making smart decisions and then tracking the KPIs, and to do this, you certainly need a BI tool such as Power BI.
Key Performance Indicators (KPI) demonstrate how effectively a company is achieving the set targets. To learn more on Power BI: https://powerbitraining.com.au/using-kpi-visual-in-power-bi/
Building blocks
There are certain building blocks from raw data to information. This diagram is showing those building blocks of how raw data is converted to information by its transformation which provides wisdom.
The Self-Service BI Workflow
From data capturing till its visualization, there is a workflow listed below.
To learn Data Transformation: https://powerbitraining.com.au/category/data-transformation/
To learn Data Visualization: https://powerbitraining.com.au/category/data-visualization/
What is Insight?
Business Intelligence is also described as getting insights from raw data, so we also need to understand the insight and break it into different parts. The anatomy of insight is given below.
By looking at this visual we can answer these questions.
What Happened?
Our sales revenue in 2020 is 120 million. It alone does not qualify for insight because there is no context to compare it. When we compare it with the last year’s revenue, we can categorize this 26% increase which shows a good performance, but something is still missing.
Why did it happen?
By further analysis, we come to know that this increase is due to price increase in the last month of the last year so there is no growth in terms of units sold. When we further compare it with the budget for 2020, there is a deficit of around 53%.
How Should we react?
We will drill-down our analysis further to see what exactly is causing this deficit. The drill down feature of power bi with variance and bullet charts are very handy in this case.
To learn more on drilling through and drilling across the report: https://powerbitraining.com.au/drilling-through-and-drilling-across-the-report-in-power-bi/
Conclusion:
Business intelligence is the process of drawing useful information from raw data. It involves a number of stages from getting raw data, cleaning, transforming, analyzing, visualization to drawing insight. Insight is a useful information which helps to understand the business processes and uncover hidden facts. In this blog a review of basic self-service BI workflow is presented.
Are you a data analyst and want to learn more about Power BI?
Why not sign up for Power BI training in Australia. We provide our services in the following regions:
