Just like a craftsman requires a toolset equipped with hammers, nails, and screwdrivers, individuals pursuing careers in business intelligence (BI) must be conversant with specific software tools. Business intelligence entails companies' functions, strategies, and instruments to collect, analyze, and analyse data.
Business intelligence tools can identify new opportunities for businesses to increase return on investment (ROI) and competitive advantage based on insights identified. These tools are used across all departments, industries, and business consumers, so consider investigating one to accelerate your career.
Here's a glimpse at the benefits of BI tools and five of the most commonly used tools.
What Is A Business Intelligence (BI) Tool?
Business intelligence tools collect, process, and analyse large quantities of structured and unstructured data from internal and external systems. Data sources might include documents, images, emails, videos, journals, books, social media posts, files, and more. BI tools discover this information through queries, which can display the data in user-friendly formats, such as reports, dashboards, charts, and graphs.
The tools can perform functions like data mining, data visualisation, performance management, analytics, reporting, text mining, predictive analytics, and more. As a result, employees can utilize this information to make better decisions based on predictions, market trends, and key performance indicators (KPIs).
Benefits of BI Tools
BI tools can help your business take clever, agile measures toward accomplishing larger objectives.
Centralised data: All of your data is in one place. Companies aggregate data from numerous databases, portals, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and more. To make sense of it all, you'll need business intelligence tools to aggregate the data together and produce particular views (issues, trends, analytics) based on your queries or what you want to know.
Self-sufficiency: Data no longer just belongs to your company's IT personnel. Any employee without technical expertise—even interns—can access and analyse data necessary for their respective teams. They can produce reports on all electronics transactions in 2020 or visualise patient records to identify COVID-19 cases in 2022.
Make predictions: With access to so much data from the past and present, employees can make evidence-based decisions. Predictive analytics and forecasting enable users to generate insights based on a product or service's performance history. If a business condition changes, intelligent tools can automatically figure out the anomalies, and you can react to disruptions as they arise.
Automatic reports: Many BI tools are automated instead, so you don't need to manually input data into Excel spreadsheets or toggle between various tools. If you need a report on a product over a specific time, the tool will generate that for you. If that information is significant, and you want to add it to a presentation, you can create interactive visualisations and export any charts or diagrams you may need.
Reduces business costs: BI tools can do so much—from analysing consumer behaviour and sales forecasting to real-time process monitoring—that analysing, planning, and reporting processes are way more efficient and accurate than ever. More than 50 per cent of BI tools users said these benefits helped them reduce costs and increase revenue.
Top 5 Business Intelligence Tools
Dozens of BI applications are available today. To determine the top five, these were commonly cited among websites that ranked the top BI tools in India. These five BI tools are not ranked in any particular order.
1. Microsoft Power BI
One of the most prominent BI products is Power BI from software colossus Microsoft. This downloadable software enables you to perform analytics on the cloud or in a reporting server. This interactive utility syncs with sources such as Facebook, Oracle, and more to generate reports and dashboards in minutes. It includes built-in AI capabilities, Excel integration, and data connectors. It also offers end-to-end data encryption and real-time access monitoring.
2. Tableau
Tableau is known for its user-friendly data visualisation capabilities, but it can do more than create beautiful infographics. Their offering includes live visual analytics, an interface that allows users to drag and drop icons to detect trends in data rapidly. The tool supports data sources such as Microsoft Excel, Box, PDF files, Google Analytics, and more. Its versatility extends to being able to interact with most databases.
3. Qlik
Qlik is a BI product that emphasizes a self-service approach. It supports various analytics use cases, from guided apps and dashboards to custom and embedded analytics. This tool also offers a user-friendly interface optimised for touchscreens, sophisticated AI, and high-performance cloud platforms. Its associative exploration capability, Search & Conversational Analytics, allows users to pose queries and uncover actionable insights, which helps increase data literacy for those new to using BI tools.
4. Dundas BI
Dundas BI is a browser-based BI application that's been around for 25 years. Like Tableau, Dundas BI features a drag-and-drop function that allows users to analyze data independently without involving their IT team. The application is known for its simplicity and flexibility through interactive dashboards, reports, and visual analytics. Since its inception as a data visualisation tool in 1992, it has evolved into an end-to-end analytics platform that can compete with today's new BI tools.
5. Sisense
Sisense is a user-friendly BI tool that emphasizes on being simplified and streamlined. With this application, you can export data from sources like Google Analytics, Salesforce, and more. Its in-chip technology enables for quicker data processing compared to other instruments.
Key features include the ability to embed white-label analytics, meaning a company can completely customise the services to its requirements. Like others, it has a drag-and-drop feature. Sisense enables you to share reports and dashboards externally with your team members.
Read Also: Success in Business-to-Business
Other Prominent Bi Applications Include:
- Zoho Analytics
- Domo
- Datapine
- Yellowfin BI
- Looker
- DataBox
- Oracle Analytics Cloud
- Freshworks CRM
- Pentaho
- Infor Birst
- Intercom
- Google Data Studio
- HubSpot
