The Major Benefits of Business Intelligence (Reaction Paper Sample)

The Major Benefits of Business Intelligence
What have you learned from this class?

My interaction with Rita de la Torre has made me learn a lot about business intelligence. Torre defines business intelligence as an assortment of techniques and applications that businesses rely on for data analysis and presentation of actionable information necessary for decision making. Generally, business intelligence offers the past, present, and future of organizations’ operations. The major components of business intelligence include prescriptive and predictive analysis, data analytics, and reporting. The major benefits of business intelligence include improved business processes such as decision making, operational, management, and forecasting. In improving management processes, business intelligence helps managers in planning, measuring, and controlling the revenues received and costs encountered. It also helps businesses in engaging in better adjustment settings especially with the guidance from competitor analysis with which a business can appropriately change trends as required.
From Torre’s work, I have learned the specific ways through which business intelligence helps enterprises. Firstly, business intelligence helps enterprises know their business which occurs with its provision of organizational data. Enterprises can also make better decisions with the help of business intelligence as it enables the formation of improved business decisions due to the presence of historical and predictive data. It also makes the access and sharing of information easy and enables real-time analysis in addition to analyzing consumer and competitors’ data to help the firm in gaining an advantage over its competitors which is very crucial for growth. Torre also covered the business intelligence process which involves data sources, data warehousing, data exploration, data mining, and data visualization. On the application of business intelligence, she covered its platforms and capabilities in terms of development and integration, information delivery, and analysis. Here, I have learned about the business analytical tools presented by business intelligence that offer company hindsight, insight, and foresight in the processes of descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analytics.
I have also learned about the basic business intelligence infrastructure which includes databases and data files, data warehouses, and data marts. A data file is a file in a computer responsible for storing data to be used by some applications or systems in the computer. On the other hand, a database is a systematized collection of data stored in the form of several data sets. A data warehouse is a form of the database developed from the integration of data from several different sources. Business intelligence relies on a data warehouse for the provision of standardized and consolidated data in a multidimensional database. Data marts are sub-parts of data warehouses as they hold information for specific sectors in an organization. From Torre’s class I can easily construct data warehouses and make good use of the various Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) tools in business intelligence. Consequently, I can now make good application of business intelligence in different areas of a firm’s operation such as in managing performance, conducting market research, customer relationship management, website analysis, and benchmarking.