What is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence (BI) is the practice of supporting decision making through the presentation and analysis of data. BI supports analytical processes such as: customer segmentation, product mix analysis, budgeting, and operations improvements. Techniques and tools associated with BI including data mining, dashboards, statistical analysis and regression modelling
Business Intelligence serves to address business questions such as those outlined below, through the careful analysis and presentation of data.
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What makes the most money within the organisation?
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How can money be saved in the organisation?
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Which areas in your business are growing the fastest?
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How do you share information about customers?
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How do you grow your customer base (breadth) and how do you mine existing customers (depth)?
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How do you manage your internal processes?
The 3fifteen Business Intelligence Competency
3fifteen is a Gold Certified Microsoft partner, with specialisation in Business Intelligence. The Business Intelligence competency focuses on end to end Microsoft Business Intelligence implementation, and has a full complement of Microsoft Certified Staff. 3fifteen were named as runners up in the Business Intelligence Solutions category at the 2010 Microsoft Partner Awards held at Sun City.
3fifteen Best Practice For Delivering Business Intelligence In The Organisation
Traditionally, BI projects are difficult to justify to business users, as the tangible benefits of an enterprise BI implementation (specifically reporting, dashboards and self-service components) are only delivered after the enterprise data warehouse has been developed. Typically 80% of the project time is taken up in the development of the enterprise data warehouse, which means that 80% of the project cost would have been spent by the business before seeing any tangible value.
At 3fifteen we recognise the imperative of delivering tangible benefits to business sooner. We have therefore developed a methodology that provides these tangible benefits early in the project. By creating three project processes, QWK-WIN, Data Warehouse and Presentation, we are able to provide a waterfall approach to implementing a BI project that allows for the creation of reports, dashboards, and self-service BI within a short timeframe from the start of the project. In typical deployments the business value can be realised at the end of the first month of the project.
For more information on 3fifteen's QWK-WIN approach, click here.