BI (business intelligence) is the collecting, combining and visualising of business data to base decisions on — usually in the form of dashboards and reports. Well-known BI tools are Power BI and Looker Studio.
BI in practice
Good BI answers three questions of increasing difficulty: what happened (revenue, margin, lead time), why (breaking it down by customer, channel, period) and what that means for tomorrow. The technical half of the work sits below the surface: pulling data from source systems, cleaning it and relating it together in a data model.
The pitfall is confusing BI with 'a chart next to the numbers': a dashboard built on dirty or manually supplied data mostly automates the distrust. So start with the source and the refresh. What a professional dashboard costs is covered in What does a Power BI dashboard cost?
Related terms
- KPI — A KPI (key performance indicator) is a measurable figure that shows how an organisation or process is performing on something that truly matters — revenue per customer, delivery time, time-to-fill, error rate.
- Dashboard — A dashboard is a visual overview of an organisation's or process's most important figures, refreshed automatically from the source systems.
- Data model — A data model is the structure in which data and its mutual relationships are captured: which tables there are (customers, orders, products), which fields they contain and how they are linked to one another.
- ETL — ETL stands for Extract, Transform, Load: pulling data from source systems (extract), reshaping it into a usable structure (transform) and writing it to a target system such as a database or dashboard (load).