Business Intelligence Infrastructure: What It Is, How It Works, and More
GCC countries, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait, have become hubs of construction and infrastructure projects. Every business entrepreneur, regardless of size, aims to stay ahead in the competition here, where they leverage data for everything, from project sales leads to forecasting to market analysis, to fetch accurate details about the major projects. It helps not just to make data-driven decisions, but a clear view of the current market situation and internal operations.
However, although every small and large business uses data for internal and external operations, unstructured data chunks are of no use. Want to make them into something useful? Here’s where business intelligence (BI) infrastructure systems come into play.
In today’s blog, we are going to discuss what Business Intelligence (BI) is, how it works, its implementation, and much more. Let’s get started.
What Is Business Intelligence?
When it comes to business actionable insights, Business Intelligence (BI) is the best way to hold on. It is a set of practices for analysing, structuring, and collecting raw data to turn the unstructured data sets generated from internal and external resources into something useful, like information dashboards or easy-to-grasp reports. With the help of Business intelligence tools integration, you can manage the operational workflow of your company, while making data-driven decisions.
How Does BI Work: Understanding the Process
When it comes to the Business Intelligence (BI) process, we can divide it into five different stages, including:
- Data collecting
- Data standardisation
- Data storage
- Data analysis
- Reporting
The first step involves gathering information generated from internal and external resources, including Google Analytics, ERP, CRM, market data suppliers, industry analytics, and much more. In the second stage of the process, data is prepared for analysis. The third stage involves loading the set of information in the data warehouse for further automated analysis to transform unstructured data into something useful and actionable through different qualitative and quantitative analytical methods. At the final stage, the data is presented in reports through dashboards, graphical imagery, or any other form of visual representation. You can use this business intelligence and analytics to extract actionable details or communicate with your team.
Note: Advanced technologies used in Business Intelligence (BI) to turn unstructured and semi-structured data are also used as front-end tools to operate big data and data mining.
Understanding the Differences Between Business Intelligence and Predictive Analytics
Many business entrepreneurs find BI and predictive analytics confusing, as both intersect with each other in terms of knowledge. These two terms are not likely to be used as alternatives. Any small or big organisation has these four stages of analytics maturity, including:
- Predictive analytics
- Prescriptive analytics
- Descriptive analytics
- Diagnostic analytics
Predictive analytics involves forecasting future business trends and considering past and current events based on their data processing.
The last two stages involve Business Intelligence (BI) infrastructure that will answer the questions, ‘What is going on and Why?’ Here, the diagnostic and descriptive analytics research the current market conditions and internal processes of the company and identify development opportunities.
On the contrary, prescriptive analytics is an advanced type of Business Intelligence (BI) that identifies business problems and recommends the required actions to take.
Business Intelligence Implementation
When adopting BI in your business, you can break it down into two basic steps- Introduction and Business Intelligence integration tools and applications. For example:
- Introducing BI to your employees and stakeholders as a concept
- Setting the KPIs, objectives, and requirements
- Looking for a custom solution once you choose the BI tools according to your business size
- Collect a business intelligence (BI) team from different departments of your organisation to work on the strategy.
- Document your strategy in BI and set up the BI data integration tools to configure a data warehouse based on the architectural approach.
- Implement the reporting tools and dashboards.
- Conduct training for your employees (end-users)
In Conclusion
Now, if you are looking for a business intelligence (BI) infrastructure system on the market, PROJECT INTEL is the one to hold on to. Whether it be urban construction development analysis, tracking infrastructure projects, or listing major projects with leading consultants and contractors, this real-time construction data analysis platform has got you all covered. You can have a clear outlook of the GCC construction market analysis under a single roof.