Business professionals like managers from different industries would need information, whether real time, current or past information, to aid them in predicting the course of the business of the company. Considering that business intelligence is a stream of data, it needs to be sorted out as well as to be analyzed before it is suited for use in a company’s decision making process. These relevant data needs to be sorted out and analyzed with the use of software solutions, thus ensuring superior speed and accuracy in the collection of data and in analysis procedure. All software solutions therefore that help in the process to get business intelligence are called business intelligence tools. Therefore, in order for a company to adjust quickly to a changing business environment, business data is to be used, while the ensuring of the business environment of a correct and reporting fast in the decision making process would fall on the business intelligence tools. For historic data, the sorting and analysis of data are done by the business intelligence tools which were stored before in the database of the firm.
There are different classification of the business intelligence tools when being used, and these are the local information systems, business performance management, process mining, dashboards, online analytical processing, data warehousing, data mining, reporting and querying software and spreadsheets.
Note that many of the business intelligence tools enumerated above, with the exception of spreadsheets, are readily part of the software that would suit for a specific business, standalone solutions, ERP system components or as business intelligence software suite. In order to answer the specific requirement of the client, a custom development company develops these solutions after a well analyzed business model of the company. The varying industry, market conditions and specific market needs would dictate the type of business intelligence that will be implemented.
There are terms synonymous with local information system which are used from different areas of the world like data observatory and community information systems, of which the system is to provide support for the reporting of geographic enterprise operations. There is a unique functions that a local information system tool or LIS hold that can provide a territory specific database where citizens, policy makers, managers and data experts can access.
With regards to the next tool called business performance management or BPM, it can be referred to the set of management and a process analysis of which the design is made to facilitate the improvement the processes within the company in lined with the goals of the firm that were preset already.
Several data experts can be consulted to help a company set up its business intelligence tools, and one name that come out if you search is Mayank Gupta.