Each week please post an original reply to my discussion question by 11 p.m. Wednesday evening Eastern Time (ET). Include at least 250 words in your reply. Indicate at least one source or reference in

Business Intelligence to a lot of the people is just a buzzword where not many are aware of what it exactly means. One can think of Business Intelligence as a high level technology driven process that helps analyze the user data and present it in a visual way for the end user based on which various business decision are taken. (Negash, 2008) Usually, BI consists of a plethora of tools that can help manipulate the data as needed and report against the various type of data, filter the data, gather different types of data from both internal and external systems which can then be used by a Business Consultant o review and analyze before sending it to the customer.

One can also create a variety of reports, user defined dashboards, etc. to ensure the results are available to the decision makers within the company so that they can read through and take future decisions. (Negash, 2008)

It is really important to have a BI tool in any organization to be able to view the data at a detailed level using which one can analyze the profit and loss within a certain department. (Negash, 2008) Some of the benefits that the BI offers are that they help in better decision making, help optimize both internal and external business process, drastically increase the operating frequency and efficiency of the product besides staying a step ahead of their competitors in the challenging market.(Negash, 2008)

As a part of my current job, I work on Jaspersoft, which is a BI reporting tool using which I create user specific custom reports to pull the data from the various tables and present it to the customer in the required format. (Negash, 2008) Our company has been using the BI tools for a long period of time to analyze the data that helps give visibility to the customer on where their spend is and how much are they spending on certain categories. (Chaudhuri, 2011) This BI software also includes a data visualization software embedded into it using which one can design various types of charts besides building custom dashboards, key performance scorecards, etc.(Chaudhuri, 2011)

My organization uses Jaspersoft tool as its BI application for a number of reasons. The way it helps and benefits the organization is spread across multiple departments and areas.(Chaudhuri, 2011) Currently, we use this tool for aligning our company objectives and activities with the strategies defined by the executives, greatly reduce the amount of time spent on manual data entry and data manipulation, get exposure and in depth knowledge about real time use of customer data, come up with various tactics and methods to cut down on implementing costs and allocate the budget correctly and also make sure the productivity is increasing within the company with less spend.

References

Negash, S., & Gray, P. (2008). Business intelligence. In Handbook on decision support systems 2 (pp. 175-193). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Chaudhuri, S., Dayal, U., & Narasayya, V. (2011). An overview of business intelligence technology. Communications of the ACM, 54(8), 88-98.