Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is a general term that applies to any technology-based solution responsible for turning raw data into strategic business decisions.

Understanding Open Source Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is a general term that applies to any technology-based solution responsible for turning raw data into strategic business decisions. Business analytics (often referred to as BA) is just one part of this all-encompassing label; business intelligence (often called BI) applies to an ecosystem of infrastructure, tools, and processes that manage data gathering, processing, integration, and analysis. Advanced BI software offers self-service capabilities that enable business users and analysts to connect to data sources and begin exploring them visually. What begins as unstructured, disparate data becomes meaningful business insights made available to those who need it most.

Open Source Business Intelligence Analytics

If trying to determine what business analytics versus what is business intelligence is, remember this: analytics precedes intelligence, both alphabetically and metaphorically. Business analytics encompasses the skills, platforms, and procedures used for continuous, cumulative exploration of past business data to gain insight and drive strategic growth. Data pipeline management and automation generally breaks down to three phases: engineering, preparation, and then analytics. Once analytical processes have been established, then it’s time to dig into the usable intelligence.

After data prep has been finalized and the analysis is completed, it is often delivered in a dashboard or report. At this stage, users should be able to engage in unlimited data discovery, referring to all data sets in an easily accessible, visual manner. Exemplary BI/BA platforms offer the ability to integrate content into other applications, usually in the end user interface, and customize the resulting analytics user experience. Dashboards and other handy data visualizations empower users across the organization to utilize governed data, giving a top-to-bottom view of the data that matters most.

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Benefits Of Business Intelligence

Real World Applications

For companies looking to accelerate their data pipeline or make sense of their data lake, business intelligence tools (including business analytics) are critical. However, not all tools are created alike. Interface and output are both important, but they’re both also useless if they’re not being fueled by the right data. Platforms that collect, prepare, and structure data sets efficiently yield the greatest ROI.

Healthcare

Open Source BI helps healthcare providers improve quality of patient care, reduce costs, streamline operations and ensure regulatory compliance. Specific use cases include:

  • Data management and monitoring for HIPAA compliance
  • Data discovery tools and self-service analytics to improve patient flow and efficiency of admissions and discharges
  • Creation of an organization-wide view of spending and cash flow

 

Read more detailed information about BI for Healthcare use cases.

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Retail

Open Source BI helps retailers gain greater visibility into their customers, product sales, and suppliers to improve their financial performance and maximize profits. Specific use cases include

Data Collection

On a very basic level, BI starts with data ingestion. Information is extracted from the source — like a CRM, ERP, or billing database — and is subsequently consolidated. It’s scrubbed for quality, transformed in format and content, and then moved into a target system (often Hadoop, a data warehouse or a relational database) for business intelligence tools and business analytics purposes.

Data ingestion can turn into data congestion surprisingly fast, though; having remote data sources, new data types, and increasing data volumes adds complexity to a project, especially when attempting a data migration. As organizations scale up data onboarding from just a few sources to hundreds or more, IT’s time becomes monopolized; data engineers can end up developing hundreds of hard-coded data movement procedures, creating a highly manual, highly risky process.

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Data Preparation

Zylpe with open source BI can help to blend, prepare, and enrich multiple data sources; all of this cross-system collaboration paints a more complete picture of your customers and business entities. Data analysts, data engineers, data scientists, and other users should be able to integrate and prepare semi-structured and unstructured data across Hadoop, NoSQL, analytic databases, and any other emerging big data technologies — all in conjunction with traditional data sources.

An intelligent BI platform allows users to visually onboard data to Hadoop and refine it at scale by processing data in-cluster, parsing, cleaning, joining, and enriching it along the way. Once everything is prepared, it can be properly sorted into relevant reporting tools and orchestrated accordingly.

When you blend operational data sources together with big data sources, you create an on-demand analytical view across key customer touch points. One shared, secure, governed view allows key stakeholders to gain powerful insights into buyers, the brand, its products, and services. Data-driven decision-making isn’t a buzzword; it’s a methodology, and the reason why Open Source BI believes in each and every one of its products. Browse through our solutions and get in touch today to discuss what would work best for your business.

POC Trials/Projects in 6 to 12 Weeks

Zylpe IoT provides Proof of Concept (POC Trials) of the Zylpe IoT Applications, Zylpe IoT Platform, and Zylpe Enterprise Data Lake on AWS or Azure. Trials range in cost based on duration and include Zylpe IoT professional services and AWS or Azure infrastructure services.