Business Intelligence Development: Why It Matters
Businesses create an enormous amount of data from multiple siloed sources, but this data is useless unless it is structured and visualized correctly.
This is when qualified Business Intelligence developers jump in, to provide intelligent insights, market trends panorama, and current business situations. They leverage tools to access and analyze data sets, present analytical findings in reports, dashboards, graphs, charts, and maps.
To make it short: Business intelligence (BI) consists of ‘strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis of business information.’ BI developers make the data understandable.
Although it requires investment, business intelligence development is proven to be worth it. Nucleus Research stated that companies could earn ten times more for every dollar spending on business intelligence, performance management, and predictive analytics.
Not to mention, BetterBuys mentioned in its business intelligence stats companies use analytics are likely to make five times faster decisions.
Who needs business intelligence development?
BI development can be applied across a wide range of industries.
For instance, it can be used in retail sectors. Large companies like Target, Walmart, or Home Depot have thousands of stores across the globe and dispersed data.
Without BI development, they may overlook some certain products sold only once in a while, yet call for effort and money to be kept on the self. Or they may have failed to predict that the new St.Ives body lotion will be out of stock soon - their unhappy customers are going to buy it from their competitor.
So, without all the inventory data collected and shown, they are losing money.
Another industry like Aviation, the cost of mistakes is even higher. Predictive analytics and business intelligence development are critical, for example, to show that some devices don’t corporate well under certain conditions in some specific parts of a plane. 
Even the food and beverage industry’s big-name like Coca Cola can maximize operational efficiency using business intelligence. The manual reporting processes restricted access to real-time sales problem can be solved by utilizing the BI platform to automated manual reporting processes, saving 260 hours working a year.
BI development can also bring advantages to the educational sector. Let’s take Des Moines Public School (DMPS) for an example. One of the problems it stumbled upon was the manual Excel report that administrators couldn’t see up-to-date data like attendance. The DMPS Research and Data Management team used advanced analytics to improve dropout rates and better understand various teaching methods on individual student outcomes.
In telecom, business intelligence is used to track performance, create a marketing campaign and profitability, etc.
What infrastructure and expertise you need for BI development
Firstly, we have to build an orchestrated ecosystem of platforms to collect dispersed data from various sources like CRMs, spreadsheets, reporting software.
Next, you’ll need a data warehouse for storing structured data or data lake for storing a vast amount of data (data lake can comprise either unstructured data or structured data). You’ll have two options: build on-premises or used solutions as a SolaaS (solution-as-a-service) developed by big names like IBM, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc.
(Check out our previous blog post to understand the roles of Data warehouse and ETL)
Secondly, you need to have a qualified team of Big Data engineers and BI developers to collect all data and clean up. ETL is at the core of BI development and usually takes a lot of time to finish the process.
BI developers should be proficient in using various tools like MS SQL, Oracle, MySQL Hbase, Big SQL Data Lakes, SSIS, SSAS, Tableau, AWS Redshift, QlikView, etc.
After that, BI developers can generate useful insights.
How to build and use the BI solution
If you’re a business owner and looking for a BI software development partner, you should for someone who can analyze and establish a customer’s business needs while working with the available requirements.
Besides human resources, you also need to build a platform to extract data from many sources and create a data warehouse and data lake design. Data architect and big data engineers must be responsible for building on-premises BI solutions or customizing an integrating the cloud-based ones.
After the BI solution is deployed, you must validate the result - the main focus of BI development is extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL) for the data warehouse, extracting, loading, and transforming data for the data lake.
When implementing BI development, you can optimize the performance of business intelligence solutions.
During the development process, you should continuously support the solution, and maintain the data is essential.
Some tools that can be used to visualize the data are QlikView, Tableau, and Power BI.
And, most importantly, turning data into business’s valuable insights.
Side Note
No matter what domain you are in, businesses across the globe, all profits from data. However, to do so, a vast amount of data need to be well-structured, cleaned up, stored in one place, and adequately visualized. Moreover, a team of experienced and qualified BI developers and Data engineers will be a game-changer.
At TP&P Technology, we provide solutions that can leverage all sources and tools that can help you transform your business. Talk to one of our team members to know what we can offer!
