A tremendous amount of data is being generated in modern-day enterprises, especially for modern business Enterprises. Managers in every business department need relevant, accurate, and timely information to make critical decisions required for success.
Information is growing at an insane rate, and so is the demand for analytics. Data generation is not slowing down, and it’s going to continue to keep growing. The challenge with data is that it needs to be processed. Business managers in every organization need relevant, timely information to make critical decisions required for their success. The challenges of these decisions continue to grow, given the huge amount of data that managers need to work with.
The business world has become such a prominent place with regards to data that’s it getting unmanageable. There is so much of it that it’s hard to digest or even translate. So, it’s hard to make good solid decisions for the company to be successful. This also means that huge opportunities are being missed every day because managers cannot see correlations.
Collecting data by itself is not enough. You have to be able to process that data to make correlations between different patterns and behaviors. This allows management to make business decisions on how to spend money when to execute certain types of plans or projects, and it all depends on the data you have.
It’s fair to say that you rely on data to make business decisions, whether it is a small or medium-sized enterprise like an accounting firm or a financial services firm. In doing so, you will need an IT partner who will formulate an IT strategy for your business that best suits your goals and objectives. This is where the services of an IT Support or Managed IT Services Melbourne company can be increasingly valuable.
Different Types of Data
Sales data, marketing data, inventory data, HR data, weather data, logistics are used by Business Intelligence (BI) data analysts to solve a wide variety of problems. Business managers must be able to draw correlations to understand relationships between all these different types of data. This presents another problem because the data is not unified. The data is fragmented and exists in hundreds of databases.
The data could even exist in CRMs, ERPs, excel sheets, and google docs, making it all the more difficult to integrate it. There is a trend in fixing problems with business data, and that’s what business intelligence architecture is about.
BI Architects help business managers develop a cohesive architecture that empowers the business to pull all the data together and report in a timely, effective, and accurate fashion to help drive the company in a positive direction and succeed.
Modern Business Intelligence Uses
Modern Business Intelligence is the method and tools used to analyze specific data about the performance of different kinds of businesses, including accountants, finance firms, or CPA. A retail organization may want a report that shows how a sales team is performing in a specific region. Understanding the team’s performance is not just sales, but you are also looking for other patterns like the products that are selling well in that region. From the inventory and stock management perspective, when a product is in high demand, you can order more of it and gauge consumer interest during different times of the year. Certain products are cyclical and tend to sell well during different times in the year. These are decisions that the business managers need to make, so they need the data.
What if a product is fast-moving goods? Sometimes managers need to make decisions in real-time based on historical or current information, and that’s where Business Intelligence can be implemented.
Modern Business Intelligence Architecture
Modern Business Intelligence uses user data, information management, and technology components as input from various sources, governed by the Business Intelligence Architecture framework (BIA). The BIA framework is used to build Business Intelligence (BI) systems for reporting and data analytics. Each BI architecture is different depending on the specific information resources and needs of the organization.
Data comes in various formats, stored in databases and different formats like MS SQL, SAP, Oracle, web metrics, and web analytics. The analysts may need one data point and another data set from a separate database in different departments like finance, accounting, HR, or sales. The BI architects inventories all the business data from different departments, figure out what the company is trying to report on, and puts it together in such a format that it’s easy to report across all the different data sets. The BI architect is the person responsible for making that happen.
They are the ones going through inventory and data sources, looking at the requirements of the business, and putting together a cohesive architecture that empowers the company to make those decisions in the time frame it needs to make them in so that it can be profitable successful.
The BI Architect has to interact with all the different departments and teams working to do the analysis. The BI Architects work together with business systems analysts to pull data together to develop the architecture with the primary goal of understanding the needs and providing solutions that help the business report accurately and make decisions in a timely fashion.
Traits of a BI architect
BI Architects are technology analysts and have to collaborate with the business and other technical team members. They continually contact all the different departments of the business, like accountants, finance team, or sales, from different geographic regions. They have to pull data from databases of different systems and different forms like excel sheets.
They have to collaborate and work with other teams; they are not doing this in a vacuum. Through all the work they do, they have to look at the big picture that will empower the company to be successful. They have to answer what this company needs in terms of reporting and analytics to help it be successful.
They have to understand the company and its future IT strategy and see the big picture to develop the bi architecture that meets those needs. And in doing so, they have to be curious to find the correct data; the data they are looking for could come from different unknown sources. The BI architect has to look a little deeper about what people are doing, how they are capturing that data, and where that data resides.
This could involve much learning from BI architects to get up to speed on all those data sources. They have to be good problem solvers because insufficient data means bad decisions, so you have to be on the lookout for discrepancies because bad decisions can lead to company losses and, potentially, jobs. Strong background in computing, technology, accounting, and mathematics are good skills for a BI Architect.
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