By Nabeel Chohan, AcceleratingCFO Consultant (UK)
Nabeel has extensive experience in management of financial reporting for global organizations, primarily within the technology, media and entertainment sector. Nabeel is a Chartered Certified Accountant licensed in London, United Kingdom.
Goodbye spreadsheets, hello dashboards. Many businesses are now moving towards business intelligence (BI) solutions to organize their financial data. Not only does this new technology showcase real time information, but the Application Programming Interface (API) allows businesses to link BI tools from multiple data sources, providing a more comprehensive and detailed financial picture.
What is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence is a set of processes, technologies, software, and services that convert original data into meaningful and actionable information and knowledge — helping businesses make key decisions. The term BI often also refers to a range of tools that provide quick and easy access to insights about an organization’s current state, based on the available data.
A BI tool boosts productivity by having data reports available with a single click. It helps the decision-makers of an organization such as CEOs and CFOs to get an overall bird’s eye view through the dashboards and scorecards.
How does Business Intelligence Integrate with Analytics?
Business Intelligence provides insights to the current/past state of an organisation whereas business analytics focuses on the future. BI has a direct impact on an organisation’s operational and corporate decisions by supporting fact-based assumptions that use historical data rather than hypothetical assumptions used to extrapolate forecasts.
The historic trends and accurate data help build strong and realistic assumptions.
The most important features and categories in BI are:
– Dashboards
– Data visualization
– Reporting
– Data mining
Future of Business Intelligence
“BI + Analytics = Future”
Machine learning will allow identification features and provide insights based on the appropriate context and factors. Artificial intelligence can analyse trends and past patterns to make reasonable assumptions relating to the data.
The future of BI is definitely going to be more automated with fewer limitations on data mining. It’s an evolving model which will be lucrative for businesses.
Takeaway: At AcceleratingCFO, we advocate the use of a dashboard to help business owners and leaders track their key performance indicators (KPIs). To learn more about dashboards and how AcceleratingCFO can assist and customize one for your business needs, contact us at info@acceleratingcfo.com.