As with many buzzwords emerging from the intersection of business and technology, the phrase “business intelligence” (BI) is often misunderstood. In a nutshell, it refers to the skill and practice of extracting insights from data to realize new goals, strategies, trends, and values. A business intelligence analyst, working with a network of other knowledge workers (such […]
Are Data Scientists Needed in the Self-Service Analytics World?
As the world becomes increasingly data-driven, businesses are turning to self-service analytics to enable business users to perform their own data analysis tasks. In self-service analytics, business users can access and analyze data without assistance or support from IT personnel or data scientists. Direct access to ML-powered analytics platforms allows them to make better business […]
Data Observability: What It Is and Why It Matters
As a process, data observability is used by businesses working with massive amounts of data. Many large, modern organizations try to monitor their data using a variety of applications and tools. Unfortunately, few businesses develop the visibility necessary for a realistic overview. Data observability provides that overview, to eliminate data flow problems as quickly as […]
Fundamentals of Prescriptive Analytics
Prescriptive analytics uses historical data to find the best course of action for the future. In a way, prescriptive analytics combines elements from both descriptive and predictive analytics to arrive at actual solutions. The increased preoccupation with everything “data” is now a mainstream trend. The analytics market is expected to reach $190 billion in 2023, growing […]
A Brief History of the Data Warehouse
A data warehouse stores data from in-house systems and various outside sources. Data warehouses are designed to support the decision-making process through data collection, consolidation, analytics, and research. They can be used in analyzing a specific subject area, such as “sales,” and are an important part of modern business intelligence. The architecture for data warehouses was […]
Structured vs. Unstructured Data: An Overview
Structured data and unstructured data are both forms of data, but the first uses a single standardized format for storage, and the second does not. Structured data must be appropriately formatted (or reformatted) to provide a standardized data format before being stored, which is not a necessary step when storing unstructured data. The relational database […]
A Brief History of Business Intelligence
In 1865, Richard Millar Devens presented the phrase “Business Intelligence” (BI) in the “Cyclopædia of Commercial and Business Anecdotes.” He used it to describe how Sir Henry Furnese, a banker, profited from information by gathering and acting on it before his competition. More recently, in 1958, an article was written by an IBM computer scientist […]
Why Embedded BI Is the Best Option for Analytics
When a business considers the implementation of an analytics solution, it may be focused on choosing the easiest, most flexible solution to encourage its users to make analytics part of the process and to incorporate it into everyday tasks to achieve better results. When a business offers embedded BI tools with integration APIs, it provides the […]
The Impact of Poor Data Quality (and How to Fix It)
The dangers of poor data quality can cause significant damage to a business. Poor-quality data can lead to poor customer relations, inaccurate analytics, and bad decisions, harming business performance. The sources of poor data quality may seem like a small issue, but it can easily become magnified as repeat errors and different types of errors […]
Why Data Analysts End Up Playing Data Detective
Many data analysts are getting a raw deal. For all the optimism around cloud-based systems promising to make Data Management easier, analysts often wind up playing detective – battling through huge information stores on the hunt for useful data, instead of running analysis. For companies, the disillusionment driven by lumbering valuable (and rare) specialists with manual processing […]