Business Intelligence & Analytics
By: Melis Turkoglu
Tags: Data Visualization, Dashboard, Business Intelligence, Data, Business Analysis

Business intelligence is data management processes that enable organizations to make more accurate decisions about the future by collecting past and present time data and transforming these data into meaningful information with the help of various software. Business analytics is a business planning that enables organizastions to discover their performance by optimizing business processes with solutions such as predictive modelling and optimization. The main purpose of business intelligence and business analytics is to provide improvement for all departments by increasing the access of companies to their own data and accordingly it is to increase their profitability.

Companies can use the data they collect with business intelligence and business analytics applications to make strategic business decisions that increase productivity and accelerate growth by transforming them into insights on business processes. Before these applications took place, more manpower was needed by handling all business aspects one by one and therefore more time was spent.

Today, these systems are used in almost every sector such as technology, entertainment, health, finance, manufacturing and communications. One of the most important reasons why BI systems are used so widely is the growing data volume and complex data structures of companies. For instance; it is necessary to use BI systems to quickly access information such as total loans, deposits or customer transaction history in the banking sector. Thus, process improvement studies can be done easily by determining performance targets.



Business intelligence and analytics are becoming an integral part of many organizations and continue to gain momentum in importance.

Differences Between Business Intelligence and Analytics

1- Business analytics approaches the issues more comprehensively than business intelligence.

2- Business intelligence is the whole of technologies that make raw data measurable and meaningful, business analytics can also use a text in analysis processes.

3- As a result of business intelligence, display boards called dashboards are created. Business analytics includes all these outputs and also the decision process.

4- Business intelligence gives the answers to the questions such as what happened and why it happened, visually on the graphics. Examples of these questions are “Did sales increase or decrease?”, “If it decreased, why did it decrease and when?”.

5- Business analytics asks the question of what could be. To illustrate; “What will be the condition of this product in the future?”, “What is the probability of the customer buying the product?”, “What should be done to sell the product?” looks for answers to forward and optimization questions such as.

Advantages of Using Business Intelligence and Analytics

1- It enables institutions to interpret their own data more easily and quickly.

2- Thanks to the rapid analysis and planning, stronger business decisions about the future are taken.

3- Organizations can find solutions more easily against the difficulties that may arise at any stage of their projects.

4- Both customer satisfaction and sales increase with insights on customer behavior.

5- It helps you create an accurate and realistic roadmap for sales and marketing strategies.

6- Income increases while cost decreases.

7- There is an increase in operational efficiency with employee satisfaction.

8- The quality of the process is increased by analyzing the effectiveness of recruitment activities.

9- Allows you to get ahead in the competition.

Business Intelligence Process

There are many data sources created with different disciplines to store data. We can approach data sources in two different formats: file and server. While data sources in file format are files such as excel, text, json, pdf or access; data sources in server format are databases such as Google Analytics, Hadoop, Exasol or SQL Server.

Due to the rapid growth of data, many new methods have begun to emerge in data storage and access to data. Working with big data, especially kept in old databases, slows down systems and causes time loss. For this reason, the selection of the database where the data to be analyzed is extremely important.

After the data is stored in the appropriate data source, it is applied for data transformation processes such as cleaning, transformation, merger for use in the report. This period is called ETL (Extract — Transform — Load).

The data that goes through the ETL process is loaded into the data warehouse after being ready for analysis.



Then the data connection is made with the business intelligence tool, the data is visualized and display boards consisting of graphics called dashboard emerge. Accordingly, data visualization and dashboard design, which are quite popular in the world, have come into our lives in order to prepare easy-to-understand and regular reports.

Detail Information

Data visualization is the art of graphical representation of data. Thus, you can quickly notice in which month your sales are falling and easily see which day of the week your profitability reaches its peak. Therefore, data visualization is currently a vital issue. Everyone interested can bring the world of business intelligence by producing new graphics from scratch with various software languages ​​such as Javascript.

Finally, after the dashboards are prepared, they are published on the server to be shared with the relevant people.

Managers determine new strategies that will pave the way for the company in the light of the emergent reports at the end of this analysis process.

This whole process is called business intelligence.

BI Process

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