Companies use Business Intelligence (BI) to improve decision making, optimize costing, uncover business opportunities, roll ERP data into accessible reports, react quickly to retail demand and optimize prices and identify new business opportunities. BI is more than just corporate reporting and more than a set of tools to coax data out of enterprise systems.

With the help of BI systems, employees modify their individual and team work practices, which leads to improved performance among the teams. When executives see a big difference in performance from one team to another, they work to bring the laggard teams up to the level of the leaders.

Today’s BI tools, business folks can jump in and start analyzing data themselves, rather than wait for IT to run complex reports. Today’s environment most of the corporates especially Healthcare, Retail and BFSI has had a favorable impact on the Business Intelligence and Analytics market using smartphones.

Although BI holds great promise, implementations can be dogged by technical and cultural challenges. Executives have to ensure that the data feeding BI applications is clean and consistent so that users trust it.

BI projects should start with top executives, but the next group of Business head and their team members. When charting a course for BI, companies should first analyze the way they make decisions and consider the information that executives need to facilitate more confident and more rapid decision-making, as well as how they'd like that information presented to them (for example, as a report, a chart, online, hard copy). Discussions of decision making will drive what information companies need to collect, analyze and publish in their BI systems.

Although BI tools have been available for a few years, the barriers to adoption - technical complexity, high cost and lengthy timescales for delivery - have had a limited uptake to a relatively small group of users predominantly within large corporations. However, the concurrence of growing appreciation of the value of data, evolution of technology capability and the consumerization of business IT, is providing the right environment for data analysis tools which are explicitly defined by the needs of average business users to flourish.

A lot of BI tools are available in the market but they are not affordable because of licensing & implementation cost. It takes a lot of training and support to maintain such products and companies with small IT teams cannot afford such tools.

Few Steps Must Flow To Rolling Out BI Systems

Make sure data is clean, Train users effectively, Don’t spend a huge time up from developing the reports because needs will evolve as the business evolves, Take an integrated approach to building your data warehouse from the beginning, Consider what information executives need in order to facilitate quick, accurate decisions, define ROI clearly before start the project, then do a reality check every quarter or six months. Focus on business objectives.

Companies have to get their data stores and data warehouses in good working order before they can begin extracting and acting on insights.